The St John's Review, Volume 56.1 (Fall 2014)

The St. John’s ReviewVolume 56.1 (Fall 2014)

EditorWilliam Pastille

Editorial BoardEva T. H. BrannFrank HuntJoe SachsJohn Van DorenRobert B. WilliamsonElliott Zuckerman

Subscriptions and Editorial AssistantAllison Tretina

The St. John’s Review is published by the Office of the Dean, St. John’s College, Annapolis: Christopher B. Nelson, President;Pamela Kraus, Dean. All manuscripts are subject to blind review.Address correspondence to The St. John’s Review, St. John’s Col-lege, 60 College Avenue, Annapolis, MD 21401-1687.

©2014 St. John’s College. All rights reserved. Reproduction inwhole or in part without permission is prohibited.

ISSN 0277-4720

Desktop PublishingThe St. John’s Communications Office

Current and back issues of The St. John’s Review are available online athttp://www.sjc.edu/blog/st-johns-review

ContentsEssays & Lectures

Momentary Morality and Extended Ethics ..................................1Eva Brann

Enriching Liberal Education’s Defense in Universities and Colleges: Liberal Arts, Innovation, and Technē ......................14

J. Scott LeeDefinition and Diairesis in Plato and Aristotle .................................47Jon LenkowskiThe Stranger as a Socratic Philosopher: The Socratic Nature

of the Stranger’s Investigation of the Sophist................................65Corinne PainterThe Concept of Measure and the Criterion of Sustainability ...........74John D. PappasPlatonic Theōria................................................................................95Mark Shiffman

PoemsTwo Villanelles ...............................................................................124Kemmer AndersonTwo Poems......................................................................................126Elliott Zuckerman

Momentary Morality and Extended EthicsEva Brann

You have been reading and talking about virtue for quite a whilenow; therefore, that is what your teachers asked me to talk aboutto you. So I drew a hot bath (since the mind is freest when the bodyis floating) and thought what might be most to the point, most help-ful to you.

Should I review some theories about virtue, perhaps give youmy interpretation of Socrates’s or Aristotle's notions of virtue, per-haps dwell on whether from reading Platonic dialogues we can tellif Socrates and Plato thought the same and if Aristotle responds toeither of them? Or should I introduce you to Kantian morality, aworld apart from the ancients? Should I distinguish for you a visionof virtue that looks to an ideal heaven beyond and longs for per-fection from one that pays regard to the world right here and goesfor moderation? Should I explain to you that the Greek philoso-phers tends toward ethics, toward developing personal qualities ofexcellence, while the Judeo-Christian tradition tends toward moral-ity, willingness to obey the laws of God and nature? Should I listfor you different doctrines of doing right, such as eudaemonism,the teaching that happiness is the aim of virtue, or deontology, theaccount of virtue as duty and the obligation to obey commands, ofwhich Kant is the most extreme representative? For while Socrates,Plato, and Aristotle, whatever their differences, think that ethicsinvolves some sort of rightness in our feelings, emotions, and pas-sions, Kant is clear that morality at its purest is a matter of reasonalone. Reason is in its essence universal: to think rationally is tothink unexceptionably, comprehensively. So to obey the commandsof reason is to suppress all merely natural inclinations, all purely

Eva Brann is a tutor and former Dean at St. John’s College in Annapolis,Maryland. This lecture was delivered at the “Windows on the Good Life”Course at Carlton College on 16 April 2014.

idiosyncratic desires, and to intend only such actions as we wouldwant to be intended by everyone—or even to be seen as com-manded by a law of nature. This is the notorious “categorical im-perative”: “imperative” means “command” and “categorical”means “without ifs and buts” (as when someone says to you “that'sa categorical no!”). You'll see in a moment why I've brought Kant-ian morality into this talk.

One last thing I might be speaking about, and which in fact Iwill talk of in a moment, is the word “virtue.” I'll argue that thistranslation of the word the Greeks use, aretē, has its virtues, butwe should probably give it up, or at least use it with raised eye-brows.

I now want to say why none of the above, except the last, ap-pealed to me. I will tell you what seems to me the biggest troublewith academic study, and so with most of our eduction. I call itthe problem of lost immediacy. This is what I mean: There arebooks—and if your teachers chose well, they will be great ones—that are full of substance. Then there are books and articles andlectures about books. The great books (or texts of any sort) containopinions. The next level of books and articles also contain opin-ions, but they are opinions about the original opinions, becausewhoever interprets a primary text adds a perspective to it. Thenhere we are, your teachers, and we’ve absorbed some of theseoriginal opinions, as well as some of the opinions about them—and we’ve acquired some opinions of our own on top of that. Allthose levels of learning on our part can smother, drown out, yourimmediate relation to the book. But even a powerful, first-ratebook—perhaps especially such a book—can also stand betweenyou and yourself. It intervenes in your thinking and can captureit, so that you are content to think its thoughts and co-feel its feel-ings, rather than being immediately present to yourself. Or worse,it can put you off its possibly life-changing content because yousee no direct entrance to it.

Now I hasten to say that I pity people who have never beentaken over by a book or even by a teacher in that way—if, that is,the being-taken-over is the beginning of an effort, a struggle, thatissues in a gradual emergence or a tumultuous bursting out of a

2 THE ST. JOHN’S REVIEW

discovery that is truly your own. And I pity even more studentswho have been turned off by a life-enhancing text because no onehelped them to make a direct connection with it.

A witty outside observer of my college used to tell the worldthat our students arrive knowing nothing and leave knowing thatthey know nothing. I hope it’s true, provided you keep in mind thatto know that you know nothing is knowing a lot. What he meant,though, was that they had absorbed so many contradictory opinionsfrom reading so many deep books that they were in a state of ulti-mate and utterconfusion. But in that he was surely mistaken. Suchriches may be oppressive and discombobulating for a while, butthat’s a state you work yourself out of into some clarity—clarityabout “who you are,” which is a formulaic way of saying “whatyour thinking can accept and your feelings can embrace.”

Therefore I think that the second-best thing we teachers cando for our students is to show how books can be, in a fancy term,“appropriated,” made one’s own—and not just a few books of thesame sort, but many books of different sorts, different in genre,different in opinion. The very best thing we can do, of course, isto get students to read them well and talk about them to each other.

Doesn’t that broad appropriation, you might ask, imply eclec-ticism, which is a sort of intellectual cherry-picking that disregardsthe generality of a well thought-out theory, and—especially if it’san ethical or moral theory—its integration into a comprehensiveview of the ways things are? Well, yes, if ecleticism means indis-criminately collecting low-hanging fruit from here and there, it willbe cherry-picking, extracting now contextless bits and pieces. Butno, if eclecticism has a basis in the very nature of things. In a mo-ment I’ll explain this oracular pronouncement.

But first, there’s the word “virtue,” the supposed subject of mytalk. Let everyone talk as they wish, as long as they know whatthey’re saying; but I wish we wouldn't use “virtue” as a translationof that Greek word aretē—or at least that we would use it mostlywith raised eyebrows. To be sure, it has a nice argument in itsfavor: “virtue” is related both to the Latin vis, force, and vir, man.Virtue is the energy of a being that holds it together, and gives itpower, as when they say in stories: “All the virtue went out of

ESSAYS & LECTURES | BRANN 3

him.” Now as it happens, aretē is related to a Greek prefix ari-,meaning “very much, forcefully so”; thus aretē is the potency in aperson or thing to be what it is supposed to be. (Some Greeks seemto have seen a relation between aretē and Ares, the powerful war-rior-god.) Moreover, the moral virtue most highly regarded by Ar-istotle, courage, is literally called “manliness” (andreia) in Greek.So it all fits together. On the other hand, “virtue,” in a use that goesback to Shakespearean times and into the nineteenth century, wasa woman’s particular kind of manliness, namely, well-girdedchastity, her bodily and psychic inviolability. We have nothing leftbut a smile for such passionless purity. More recently, the adjective“virtual,” in its meaning of “inactual,” has come front-and-centeras an attribute of cyberspace: “virtual reality,” that is to say, “unrealreality.” We ought to have a background awareness of the sphereof connotations of our words, including their history. But, as far asthe contemporary connotations of the adjectival form of “virtue”is concerned, I don’t think we want to go there.

This means, however, that for the moment I’m left without aword for my subject. And this lack raises two really interestingquestions: Can we have a thought without a name? and Can wethink without words? Powerful contemporary writers claim that itis impossible for two reasons: There can be no external proof thatthinking is going on without someone saying something thought-ful: a furrowed brow is no evidence. In fact even our claim to bethinking doesn’t prove that we are thinking. And more important,to think is really to marshall meanings, and meanings are driftingvapours unless they are attached to a word or given structure in asentence.

Here I beg to differ with these contemporary writers. I thinkwe all experience that sense of a disembodied meaning, of pre-ver-bal thinking, that moves in our mind, sometimes like a gentle aro-matic breeze over the mental plain, sometimes like a powerful pushof air pressure against a mental wall, rousing us to seek the rightterm to catch it, the accurate language to describe it, the suitablewords to embody it.

So then, what is this mental presence that is called virtue, ef-fectiveness, excellence, dutifulness, goodness? I am supposing


here that to have too many words is equivalent to having no cogentidea. But that may be a mistake. The reason why there are numer-ous translations for the Greek word you’ve thought about underthe term “virtue” may be that in fact it encompasses a number ofways of being what is called broadly, and so a little bluntly, “good”;there are many terms because there really are different ways ofbeing humanly good. This possibility of earthly variety kicks themeaning they share, “goodness,” way upstairs, so to speak—upinto the highest reaches of thought. In the Republic, Socrates saysto the two very intelligent young men he is speaking with that hecan’t explain this Good to them in the brief space of one evening.So I feel excused from even trying in this short hour.

On the other hand, I do want to make use of the notion thatthere might be more than one way of being good—an idea that willprobably underwhelm you. It would not even have shocked peoplewho lived before the First World War, like your great-great-grandparents—though for different reasons. Nowadays many people,certainly among them the most articulate ones, believe that as longas we are socially right-minded and we don’t discriminate amongour fellow humans for being what nature made them, we can befairly forgiving of a loose personal morality. So there is public andprivate morality, one rigorous, the other relaxed. (Of course, theseare generalizations, which are never true of those in whose hearingthey are made.) Your ancestors, on the other hand, would havetended to believe what Socrates sets out in the Republic, namely,that members of different castes or classes belonging to one polit-ical community have different characteristic excellences. More-over, they knew quite well that, even within their class,people—especially well-off men—lived quite comfortably withina double moral framework. For example, men could maintain a re-spectable but loveless marriage to one woman whom they publiclyhonored, while at the same time engaging in a passionate but dis-reputable attachment to a mistress who had only private privileges.My own uncle lived that way. When he and his wife fled Germanyfrom the Nazis in 1939, his mistress was on the same train in a sep-arate compartment.

Here is what I want to do now, killing two birds with one stone


(though I’m not so much for killing birds, especially not en masse).My first aim is to take off on my own, so that my primary pointwill not be so much to explain a theory found in a book—though,as you’ll see, I’ll have to do that too in order to achieve my secondpurpose. And that second purpose is to show how one might beeclectic without being incoherent, how we might engage in pick-ing-out parts of theories of goodness without producing a mereself-pleasing miscellany, a tasty thought-goulash.

This second purpose might be of real use to you if you’re feel-ing a little snowed by all the deep and sometimes difficult theoriesyou’ve studied this year. I mean to show that you can fashion anopinion to live by through combining the most disparate concep-tions. My first aim, however, is to think out something for myselfand articulate it before a sympathetic audience.

So now to it. One human being may indeed live with twomoralities, one public, one private, and this duplicity is not alwayshypocritical; it may simply make life livable and prevent it frombecoming worse. Or, looking at it another way, there is a sayingthat hypocrisy is the respect vice pays to virtue: I think it’s betterall around that there should be such respect, once humanly under-standable and inevitable wrong-doing is on the scene. Again, com-ing to our day, some people quite comfortably cheat on their taxesand tell you that it’s a form of civic virtue to short-change a waste-ful government, but they observe strict correctness when it comesto matters of social justice. They too live in a dual moral frame.

But I want to introduce another, I think more fundamental, du-ality: the pacing of time, or, more accurately, of psychic motion. Ifyou watch the stream of cars coming toward you on the oppositeside of a highway, and there is a good deal of traffic, you’ll noticethat the cars bunch up; they practically tailgate each other until thedensity dissolves into long stretches of lighter flow. The world islike that, and so are our lives; it and we are in sync. There’s anearthquake, a tsunami, a storm, an eruption all at once after yearsof nothing. A dreary winter has lasted for ever, suddenly it’s spring,the forsythia is in bloom, the trees are bursting into leaf, and it’stime for outdoor-idling, but there are summer jobs to be lined up,final exams, parties, last-moment bonding, packing, all at once.That’s outside, but it’s similar inside: There are undistinguished


times marked, very unremarkably, by routine and repetition; lifeflows away and is canceled, collapses into one-and-any-day’sschedule. Then suddenly time develops densities; all the momen-tous moments happen together, for better or for worse. When itrains, it pours, as the saying goes.

I should remind you here that the exhilarating heights and tear-ful depths of time, or rather of eventfulness, separated by expansesof flat dailiness—these closings-up and drawings-apart of happen-ings—are a Western way of seeing the world and living in it. Thereare teachings of the East that make a virtue of unbunching time, ofletting life flow evenly—every moment as charged with presenceas any other. Thus when I called this talk “Momentary Moralityand Extended Ethics,” I was thinking only of our half of the world.

So now I’ll explain what I mean by momentary morality. I’vebeen describing an experience of time and events that includes mo-ments of crisis, either imposed on us by nature or manufacturedby us from sheer cussed, willful Westernness. Although krisis is aGreek word meaning “separation” or “decision,” and so might justbetoken any branching in the flow of events, we generally don’tmean something good by it. A crisis, as we use the word, is not somuch a branching as a stanching of the flow of events that makesits elements pile up and then burst out, often in a kind of relievingdemolition of the status quo. Certainly the living pace we share,consisting of stretches of eventless, quiet desperation or content-ment, as the case may be, which are interspersed with somewhatfrantic eventfulness, practically guarantees that every high will beat the expense of a low, as a hill is paid for by a hollow. I think thatI’ve told things the way they really are, but that I’ve left two ques-tions (at least) quite unanswered: Are the highs higher than thelows are low, that is, are there more great moments than sorryones? and What is the logic, or better, the ontology of these event-pairings of high and low? Why is natural and human life subjectto these oppositions? By “ontology,” which signifies an “accountof being,” I mean the most fundamental explanation we can findfor the way things are, including psychology in the non-medicalsense: an account of the human soul.

But I want to use this notion of bunched time, of high momentswe may hope for and low ones we can expect, of events shaped in


time like wave packets connected by a flat line—unexaminedthough the image be—to speak about the type of morality which Icall “momentary morality.” I mean those critical moments whenyou’re up against the wall, when it’s too late to think things out,when you need to be ready with an inner command to tell you whatto do—what you must do—at that very moment. The human con-dition being what it is, what you must do will tend to be somethingyou don’t want to do, or rather, something you will want with everyfiber of your feelings not to do. If at that moment you waffle aboutwhat you ought to do, or if you fail to do as you ought, you’ll neverforget that you were unprepared in a moral emergency or unstead-fast in doing your duty. You will be diminished in your self-respect.

I’ve seen it written and heard it said that such moments of ex-tremity reveal who a person really is. I don’t believe it. I think whatyou do day-by-blessedly-ordinary-day is more apt to reveal, evenwhile it is shaping, who you are. But I do know that moral failurein a crisis sticks with you: I know it from myself, I know it from atale one day told me, almost in passing, by a man I admired, and Iknow it from fiction, especially Joseph Conrad’s novel Lord Jimand Ernest Hemingway’s short story “The Snows of Kilimanjaro.”

There is a theory of morality that seems to me tailored for mo-ments of crisis and, consequently, inept in daily use. It is the Kant-ian theory of the categorical imperative I mentioned earlier on. Itis, in the compass of my reading, the most powerful, coherent, in-genious and, not incidentally, the most earnestly extremist theoryof human goodness ever devised. Like all great specific theory itis embedded in a grand grounding of human consciousness. Kantwould turn, nay, whirl in his grave to hear me assign it to so par-ticular a use, so momentary an occasion. But since I am convincedthat it is not possible to live well through the flats of life on Kantianmorality (though I lack time in this talk to explain why) and findthat even his own applications sometimes have repellent results, Ifeel less abashed at saving the pieces, so to speak. Let me explainas simply and briefly as I can how this morality might work in anemergency, and that explanation itself will go a little ways towardshowing why one can’t live that way through extended time.

We have, Kant says, a faculty for freedom, namely, our will,


our free will. To be free means to take orders from no one but one-self. Thus the free will commands itself. It gives itself its own law.There must be law, Kant thinks, because if the will were lawless itwould be the opposite of free—call it capricious, wanton. Now thewill, Kant also thinks, is an aspect of reason, which has two sides.One side is theoretical reason. This reason gives nature its lawsand then recognizes them as necessary. I will set this activity ofreason aside here—it’s what I mean by ripping his moral theoryout of the grand whole. The other side is practical reason; it givesitself its laws and so knows itself as free. You can see that it is iden-tical with the free will. The will—really myself as a free person—should, of course, obey the command of its self-given law, itsimperative. As I said earlier, this imperative permits no ifs and buts,admits no special cases, allows no individual exceptions, becauseit is addressed to reason, and reason does not contradict its ownuniversal judgment, for then it would be self-contradictory. Aboveall, it avoids the necessities, the unfree determinism, of lawful na-ture. We human beings are in part natural, namely, in our inclina-tions and desires. Our free will, our practical reason, has no truckwith the emotions and feelings that drive us. It chooses a courseentirely because it is right and not in the least because we feel goodabout it; in fact, the more it hurts the better we know we are doingour duty, doing purely as we ought. And we have a test to tell uswhether our decision is right, a test that expresses the essence ofreason: If I can universalize my particular motive for choosing anaction so as to turn it into a general law of human action or a con-ceivable law of nature, then I am choosing as I ought. I am pre-serving the purity of reason, namely its universality and itsavoidance of self-contradiction by exception-making.

Let me give a famous example by Kant himself. Suppose apersecutor comes to my door and asks if his intended victim iswithin. All my inclination is to deny it, to protect the fugitive. Butif I generalize my motive it assumes this form: Under humanitarianpressure anyone may tell a lie. And then all trust in anyone’s dec-larations collapses, for anyone can construe an exception. So youmust tell the truth, and you will have done your duty, come hell orhighwater or the murder of a fugitive. I’ve told this example be-


cause it seems to me to show how Kantian purity can turn intomoral catastrophe when life is fraught with daily danger. Just imag-ine that you’re harboring a fugitive dissident in some totalitarianstate, and, as you well know they might, the secret police comeknocking at your door. Will you tell them the truth for the sake ofthe self-consistency of reason? No, you will have recourse—if youthink you need it—to the very paralogical, paradoxical principle ofthe white lie. And, in general, I think that this absolutist morality isnot only too inhumane, but also too joyless to be livable day by day.

But let there be that one life-changing moment when, torn fromthe usually peaceful flux of ordinary life, you suddenly must de-cide. The occasion might be a temptation to commit a minor trans-gression in the world’s eyes, but one weighing heavily on yourconscience. Or it could be an unexpected call on your courage, un-welcome but unavoidable, perhaps never patent to the world butwell enough known to yourself.

These are, I think, Kantian moments, spots of time when amorality is wanted that disparages our inclinations and prompts usto duty, that provides an effective on-the-spot test of what oughtto be done, to wit: What if everyone did what it has just crossedmy mind to do? That decisive moment’s morality is the kind whichcommands without hedging.

But for most of us in this country these excruciating momentsthat, when they do come, tend, to be sure, to come in multiples,are blessedly sparse. The rational points on a mathematical line aresaid to be dense, meaning that they leave no empty interval andyet do not form a continuum (since the irrational points are miss-ing). Such is the incident-line, the event-time of our ordinary dailylife, in which every little station has its happening; but though theyare all discrete, they are so closely packed together that they arescarcely discernible. Our day has 86,400 seconds and our week604,800 seconds, and we can calculate the number of seconds inour month, our year, our decade, our lifetime. This flattish life-lineof instants, with the peaks and troughs it occasionally develops,surely requires a different notion of goodness from the one that ismarked by excruciating, disruptive moments. As I called the latter“momentary morality,” so I will call the former “extended ethics.”


Morality, remember, requires command-issuing universal law;ethics, on the other hand, demands natural and acquired personalqualities. Of the possible English alternatives to the term “virtue,”I think that “excellence” best expresses the connotations the an-cient users of the word aretē seem to have had in mind, even beforethe philosophers got to discerning a comprehensive meaning.

Let me list those connotations of aretē, understood as excel-lence, that I can think of: 1. effectiveness; 2. competition; 3. hap-piness; 4. enumerability; 5. habituation. They all have to do withthe long runs of life, the flat stretches that may buckle into peaksand valleys of glory and misery; they have little or nothing to dowith the up-against-the-wall decisions of a life fractured by a moralemergency.

I’ve spoken of the notion of aretē as an effective, potent wayof being that betokens a soul honed to a fine edge, just as a well-sharpened pruning knife is an efficient and perhaps somewhat dan-gerous object. There is a competitive tone to aretē, just as to beexcellent means literally “to rise above,” as we say, “to be out-standing.” The possessor of aretē glories in it, vaunts and flauntsit, as do the Homeric heroes. A hero is high in self-esteem, in cur-rent language. Furthermore, the aretai, the excellences that every-one recognizes, can be counted off. Socrates regularly refers tofour cardinal ones: wisdom, justice, courage, and sound-minded-ness. These excellences require the right sort of body and soul—physical and psychic talent as we would say—but also practice,habituation. It is in this last element that the difference betweenKantian morality and ethics, as I have delineated it, shows up most.Personal qualities are confirmed in habituation, in being habituallypracticed, but the free will, the self-legislation of morality is es-sentially at odds with habituation. For habit puts the natural lawsof psychology to work, and these are deterministic mechanisms.In fact, habit as a mechanism is an inhibition on spontaneousness,on freedom. What’s more, for Kant the will’s intention trumpspractical execution.

Indeed, all the points of the ethics of individual qualities arecontrasted with law-morality. The categorical imperative has, tobe sure, several forms, but it is basically one, a super-command-


ment that the free will issues and obeys, while the human excel-lences are enumerably multiple. For although excellence as excel-lence may be one super-quality, it needs to assume variousspecifications, and these may even be at odds with each other. Forinstance, courage and sound-mindedness (whose Greek term,sophrosyne, is often translated as “moderation”) may pull in op-posite directions. Certainly the competitive glorying of excellenceis unthinkable in a dutiful moralist, and the sharp-set potency andeffectiveness which goes with any excellence is absolutely out ofplay for the moral mode. Once more, in Kant’s great works ofmoral philosophy, the issue of execution, of how the passage fromdecision to effective action is accomplished, which is so crucial ajuncture in ethics, is almost completely suppressed. Ethics is a wayof being objectively good in the world; the doing is almost every-thing. Kantian morality is primarily concerned with being rightwith oneself, subjectively good; the intention is everything, thoughhard actions may, indeed should, follow. As Kant famously says:There is nothing unqualifiedly good except a good will. Note thathe does not say “a good deed.”

It is with respect to my middle point, happiness, that the dif-ference is greatest and that ethics seems to me a far more livable,day-by-day useful theory. It is essential to moral intention that nohint of nature-bound desire should taint the purity of duty done forits own sake, meaning for the sake of self-rule; no psychic pleas-ure-seeking mechanism should confuse the clarity of a commandobeyed for the sake of one's rational integrity, one’s rational con-sistency. Ethics, on the other hand, cooperates with nature; al-though it distinguishes between sound and corrupt pleasure,between excess and moderation, it nevertheless regards pleasure,in Aristotle’s words, as the bloom on our activity, and considershappiness, whatever its definition, as the proper, indeed self-evi-dent, human aim.

Recall that I have spoken about “extended ethics” as opposedto “momentary morality” and distinguished the two theories ofhuman goodness by their relation to time, or rather, to eventuation.Morality was for intense, abrupt, exigent, emergent moments ofup-against-the-wall decision making; ethics was for a looser,


smoother, less urgent, more subdued tenor of life. And indeed,everything I’ve observed about ethics seems to me to fit this lattertemporal mode better: our natural longing for accessible dailypleasure and sustainable long-term happiness in the world; our in-nocent, or not-so-innocent, human-all-too-human eagerness foradmiration; our comfort in a being buoyed up by a tradition ofrecognizably articulated excellencies; our time-consuming growthinto profitable habits and productive routines.

Above I calculated our line of life in myriads of instants al-most too brief for detection (as distinct from discernible mo-ments). Yet each had to be occupied and vacated, lived in andthrough, for better or for worse. It seemed to me that this analogyof life to a line, at once dense and pointillistic, recommended tous a theory of goodness which allowed us to be all there as naturalbeings, driven at every point of temporal existence by desire, fas-tening on some moments for fulfillment, developing excellenceand glorying in it, engaging with the world in action and with our-selves in thinking. But it also seemed that there were moments ofheightened urgency when we must oppose our pleasure-seekingand happiness-enjoying nature and forget all the flourishing ex-cellence promotes in order to obey the harsh self-command of“you ought”—no ifs and buts.

My overarching purpose, however, was to persuade you thatyour studies of ways to be humanly good can be appropriatedby you to fashion a way of your own, that they need not add upto mutual canceling-out of theories and all-round confusion ofsoul. In fact, I’m paying you a major compliment: I’m supposingthat you’re taking your learning seriously, not just, as the phrasegoes, “academically”—that you take your studies to heart as life-shaping.



Enriching Liberal Education’sDefense in Universities and Colleges:Liberal Arts, Innovation, and TechnēJ. Scott Lee

For a number of years, it has struck me that people who writeabout a “liberal-arts education” rarely write directly about thearts. They write about political, religious, and moral dispositions;they write about the rise of the sciences; they write about cul-tures; and recently, they write about the conditions of education.Sometimes, they write about books and core texts within the tra-dition of the liberal arts, but these books and their associated artsare written about as exemplars of politics, morals, science, andculture—rarely as exemplars of arts.

A recent spate of writings defending the humanities and hu-manism, the college and the purpose of education—by MarthaNussbaum, Tony Kronman, Andrew Delbanco, and Patrick De-neen—all mention liberal-arts education. They defend the fineor liberal arts, but none of these authors ground their defensesof liberal-arts education in art per se.1 All these writers sense an

1. Andrew Delbanco hardily approves of Anthony Kronman’s great-books curriculum for the ideas it raises, and he cites the artes liberalesideal of education that Bruce Kimball has extensively documented as atradition of aristocratic European liberal learning that opens the mind.But it is America’s “attempt to democratize” this tradition through itscollegiate educations that really interests him (College: What It Was,Is, and Should Be [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2012], 33.)“Working to keep the ideal of democratic education alive,” Delbanco,in an extensive analysis of the past and present social conditions of col-

J. Scott Lee is the Executive Director of the Association for Core Textsand Courses. An earlier version of this essay was presented at the Re-search University and Liberal Arts College Conference, held at NotreDame University in Notre Dame, Indiana, 9-11 June 2013.

15ESSAYS & LECTURES | LEE

leges as institutions, ultimately locates the “universal value of a liberaleducation” in the belief, derived from the nineteenth-century religiouscollege, that “no outward mark—wealth or poverty, high or low socialposition, credentials or lack thereof—tells anything about the inwardcondition of the soul” (171). He transmutes this belief, today, into aliberal education whose “saving power” (171) that allows students to“ignite in one another a sense of the possibilities of democratic com-munity” through “the intellectual and imaginative enlargement [college]makes possible” (172). He concludes, “we owe it to posterity to pre-serve and protect this institution. Democracy depends on it.” (177).Martha Nussbaum begins her “manifesto” in defense of the humanitiesand arts with a crisis in which “the humanities and the arts are beingcut away in both primary/secondary and college/university education,in virtually every nation in the world.” This entails “discarding of skillsthat are needed to keep democracies alive.” In the survival of the hu-manities and arts within educational institutions “the future of theworld’s democracies” is said to “hang in the balance” (Not for Profit:Why Democracy Needs the Humanities. [Princeton: Princeton Univer-sity Press, 2010], 1-2).

Notwithstanding a very serious concern with “ideals of freedom,”Anthony Kronman is less focused on the links between democracy andliberal education than on the links between the humanities and our cul-ture (Education’s End: Why Our Colleges and Universities Have GivenUp on the Meaning of Life. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007).He stresses particularly the humanities’ abandonment, within collegesand universities, of the search for meaning in our individual lives, andhe warns against our scientific culture’s way of aggrandizing our tech-nical powers without setting them within the limitations of human fini-tude. The combination, he believes, yields a kind of spiritual desiccation.Oddly similar to Kronman notwithstanding their published differences,Patrick Deneen argues that since the Enlightenment, greatness seemsto rest in transformation, whereas before the rise of the New Sciences,whose authors often belittled ancient books, greatness rested in a “pre-dominant understanding” of cultivated endurance, and an acceptanceof the limits of human power, knowledge, and ambition. The moderngreat books program contains many scientific, political and economicworks which support the idea of transformation. So Deneen asks, might

ebbing of liberal education correlated with the economic, scien-tific, and technological conditions under which we live. Nearly


all find that the present responses of our institutions to these con-ditions impede rather than aid the robust maintenance or devel-opment of something like a liberal education. Most of theirarguments rely on research, though their positions on whether re-search—scientific, bibliographic or otherwise—within a univer-sity favors or harms undergraduate liberal education tends torange Nussbaum on one side and Delbanco, Kronman, and De-neen on the other. In contrast, each author attempts to revive tra-ditions of the liberal arts by linking them to current conditionsof democracy, spiritual needs of cultures, or ethical understand-ings of faith. All believe that the souls of our students and ourcitizens are at stake, though of course they disagree about theconstitution of the soul and the education designed to nurture it.

A common concern among these authors is whether our cul-tural assumption that we can transform almost anything, particu-larly through the technology of science, is good for our souls andgood for liberal education. For Nussbaum, technology appears asthe attractive image of students in a lab—instead of pictures ofstudents “thinking”—that administrators use to lure students touniversities.2 Delbanco notes the advantage that the sciences haveover the humanities in public evaluations: technological land-marks of progress, accompanied by an occasional historical orphilosophic “breakthrough.”3 For Kronman and Deneen, technol-ogy is the differential gear which imparts varying force to science,culture, and education. Further, Kronman and Deneen come veryclose to each other in noting the meretricious effects upon ourcharacter and our sense of limits that technological achievementunleashes in the form of pleonexia. The humanities currently failto oppose it (Kronman), or worse, education encourages it through

there be an alternative way to think about the core texts of the ancientto medieval Western tradition, ultimately as a way of restraining ourscientifically released pleonexia for mastering and transforming ourworld? He suggests great books might be justified by recovering thisearlier understanding’s humility (“Against Great Books,” in FirstThings [January 2013], 35.)2. Nussbaum, Not for Profit, 133.3. Delbanco, College, 95. Apparently, literature does not rise to “breakthroughs.”


a philosophy of transformation, of creating original knowledgeand innovations through research (Deneen).4

4. At one point, Kronman and Deneen come very close to saying—andmeaning—the same thing. Kronman’s case for the humanities in largepart rests on controlling technology through a recognition of human lim-its: “We have a desire for control that can never be satisfied by any de-gree of control we actually achieve. We always want more. . . . This isthe human condition, which is characterized by our subjection to fatefullimits that we can neither tolerate nor do without. . . . The most importantthing about technology is not what it does but what it aspires to do. . . .Technology encourages us to believe that the abolition of fate should beour goal. . . . Technology discourages the thought that our finitude is acondition of the meaningfulness of our lives. . . . It makes the effort torecall our limits and to reflect upon them seem less valuable and impor-tant” (Kronman, Education’s End, 230-233). For Kronman, the researchideal is, of course, partly justified in the sciences by the “fruit”—both indiscovery and in technology—that it produces: “The research ideal istoday the organizing principle of work in every academic discipline. . . .In the natural sciences, the research ideal has proved remarkably fruitful.The new discoveries that pour from our college and university laborato-ries every year and the clear sense of progressive movement toward anobjective understanding of the structure and mechanisms of the naturalworld testify to the productive fit between the natural sciences and themodern research ideal.” Whereas in the humanities “understanding,” butnot a productive technology characterizes research results: “In the hu-manities . . . the benefits of research are less uniform or certain” (ibid.,130-133). Nevertheless “research in the humanities has produced resultsof lasting value. It has added importantly to our understanding of thehistorical, literary, artistic, and philosophical subjects with which the hu-manities deal.” The demands for specialization and for teaching to thatspecialization ought to be less insistently felt in the humanities: “Whatmust be resisted is the imperial sprawl of the research ideal, its expansivetendency to fill every corner of each discipline in which it takes holdand to color the expectations and judgments of teachers in these disci-plines regarding what they do. Admittedly this is asking a lot. . . . But . . .it is merely asking for a somewhat greater degree of humility on thepart of those in the humanities who first allegiance is to this ideal” (ibid.,248-249).

For Deneen, the (current) point of a philosophy of education is notto admire the world, or suffer its limits, but to change it, to transform it.


Finally, while all these authors seem to be convinced that theproducts of arts are essential to any revival, and while they areskilled fashioners of argument in areas where no single disciplinecan claim precedence, the discussion of fine or liberal arts andtheir products is not in terms of art, but in the terms of the polit-ical, cultural, or religious end sought. For example, Nussbaumdevotes large portions of her book exploring arts and a wholechapter to “Cultivating the Imagination: Literature and the Arts.”

To Deneen, it seems that since the Enlightenment, greatness seems torest in transformation. So he asks, might there be an alternative way tothink about and assign terms to the core texts of the Western tradition,ultimately as a way of restraining our excesses in transforming ourworld? He begins by accepting a stasis in the political, moral, religious,and poetic inheritance of books that extends from the ancients throughthe first stirrings of modernity: “Great books such as Paradise Lostsought to inculcate a sense of limits, . . . we could look at a dominantunderstanding of a long succession of great books from antiquity to theMiddle Ages . . . to conform human behavior and aspirations to the nat-ural or created order” (“Against Great Books,” 35). By way of Baconian,Cartesian, and Hobbesian repudiation of books, Deneen elaborates the ar-gument the he feels undermines the “human limits” understanding by try-ing to discriminate two kinds of liberty. The first, associated with greatbooks, is a “liberty . . . of hard-won self-control through the discipline ofvirtue,” which often animates defenses of great books as materials inpreparing for citizenship. The second is a liberty with “the stress . . .upon the research, creative activity, scholarly inquiry and the develop-ment of new knowledge” (ibid., 37). The former constrains our desires,the latter endlessly satisfies them through “the human project of mas-tery.” The latter pursuits were justified by the arguments of Bacon,Descartes, and Hobbes, reinforced by Dewey, which depended on theidea “that a larger number of natural forces and objects [could be or]have been transformed into instrumentalities of action” in the West thanin cultures which did not exploit the natural resources available throughscientific technology (ibid., 36). Deneen concludes that we do need toteach these two competing notions of liberty through the great books,but defenders should exchange the notion of “greatness” for a notionof “humility” derived from the earlier works of the intellectual traditionrepresented in the West (ibid., 38). Humility might, then, restrain ourexcesses in regard to transformation.


In the latter, we learn that “in order to be stably linked to demo-cratic values, [both the artistic cultivation of capacities for playand empathy in a general way, and the treatment of particular cul-tural blind spots] require a normative view of how human beingsought to relate to one another . . . and, both therefore require se-lectivity regarding the artworks used.”5 A catalog follows of thefailures of artworks, of “defective forms of ‘literature,” to culti-vate the sympathy that Nussbaum desires. Undoubtedly, Kron-man’s understanding of the search for meaning and his discussionof civilizational “conversation” depends on art; Delbanco’s dis-tinction between research and reading instances canonical worksfrom ancient to modern times; and Deneen’s argument is con-cerned with a residuum of teachings that earlier great books leaveus. Yet, in these social-moral defenses, an entire line of argumentconcerning the arts is, for the most part, relegated to an instru-mental, supporting, or ancillary role in a discussion that might betitled: “Social Conditions, Educational Institutions, and IndividualCapacities: Wither Liberal Education?”

I wish to suggest now that the ecology of liberal educationdefense could be enriched by also focusing on the arts of liberal-arts education. Then we will see what liberal education’s relationto research, democracy, or culture might be when looked atthrough the lens of the arts. Please note that my preceding re-marks are not meant to imply the absence of artistic works in lib-eral-arts programs, nor that some parts of those programs are notstructured by the arts. For example Yale’s Directed Studies pro-gram has courses explicitly divided into three groups: Literature,Philosophy, and Historical and Political Thought. Clearly litera-ture is art. Columbia’s Core’s program has the Literature/Human-ities and the Contemporary Civilization sequences, not tomention the Music offerings. Again, no one doubts that this pro-gram involves art. What I am interested in are the rationales andjustifications for programs using core texts that can be groundedin the liberal arts.

Why is it important to develop a line of argument about arts

5. Nussbaum, Not for Profit, 108.


to the point where we might see them in the guise of an end, notjust a means, to liberal-arts education? Do you remember, aboutforty or fifty years ago, if you aspired to a bachelor degree, youchose either a bachelor of science or a bachelor of arts? No onetoday questions whether a student possesses a science if she or heearns a B.S. What art or arts, however, do our students possess ifthey have earned a B.A.? So, if we claim to offer a liberal-arts ed-ucation in undergraduate bachelor programs, it might not be amissto ask what arts are our students learning and we are teaching.And asking such a question can enrich our view of liberal-arts ed-ucation using core texts—whether of the Western tradition or not.

When educators of any stripe are seeking renewal, they oftenresort to an examination of the past, so I thought the best placeto begin a search for a renewal of liberal-arts education might bein a book by Bruce Kimball first published in 1986: Orators andPhilosophers: A History of the Idea of Liberal Education.6 Thebook’s scholarship and judicious consideration of a vast numberof core texts, curricular materials, and the scholarly productionsurrounding liberal education make this work a seminal contri-bution to the history of liberal education. Kimball has paid muchmore explicit attention to the artes liberales educational ideal,especially in relation to the research ideal—or, as he styles it, theliberal-free ideal—than any current author we have examined.For our purposes he also reaches more thoroughly into the past.With the important exception of an unstable accommodation ina very few universities and colleges between these two ideals—Chicago, Columbia, St. John’s College being the primary exam-ples—his extended history gives little comfort to the convictionthat liberal-arts education, particularly in relation to democracy,has much of a chance of revival in most of today’s universitiesor colleges, precisely because of the success of the ideal of re-search throughout academe, and its allied notion of freedom.

Kimball’s history, which extends from ancient Greece to late

6. Bruce Kimball, Orators and Philosophers: A History of the Idea ofLiberal Education (New York: Teachers College, 1986; rev. ed., NewYork: College Entrance Examination Board, 1995).


twentieth-century America, reflects a two-fold tradition in edu-cation. A rhetorical liberal tradition complains about disarray anddivisions of undergraduate education, while an epistemic, re-search quarrel among the fields of science, social science, andthe humanities over “definitions of knowledge and culture” in-fluences undergraduate education.7 These two educational tradi-tions—the artes liberales ideal for citizenship and the liberal-freeideal for specialization—compete in public, graduate, and under-graduate contexts. To bring this competition down to earth at theundergraduate level: Kimball finds “it is supremely difficult foran undergraduate major . . . to coexist with a thorough [curricular]commitment to citizenship, virtues, the republic, and the appro-priation of the textual tradition of a community.”8 The reason isthat these two polarities, or ideals, are systematic: they entail dif-ferent ends, characteristic qualities, and, ultimately, curricular ex-pressions. Syntheses, accommodations, or blends of the two havelimited appeal and, typically, short lives. The artes liberales ac-commodation is unstable partly because it cannot readily convinceacademics that classics are necessary to a critical intellect, and partlybecause its insistence upon exploring ancient texts “conflicts withthe liberal-free mind” in its desire to range where it will.9

To varying degrees, then, Kimball anticipates the ambiva-lence that Kronman and Delbanco feel about reading great textsat the undergraduate level with modern research in mind. Kimballalso anticipates Kronman and Deneen’s concern with the way inwhich the rise of science has shaped our educational institutionstoward a research ideal and away from a reflective, character-building liberal-arts education. And, in a strange twist of fate,Kimball also recognizes the role of the liberal-free ideal in har-nessing science and research to the democratic and market-basednational project of the United States. And in this he anticipatesNussbaum’s and Delbanco’s attempts to have our educational in-stitutions, committed as they are to the research ideal, serve the

7. Ibid., 286. 8. Ibid.9. Ibid., 223, 225, 226.


national or international life of democracies—a role formerly re-served for the artes liberales ideal.

In sum, historically and philosophically, with research anddisciplines firmly entrenched by the rise of science in the modernuniversity, all of these authors find themselves in a very difficultposition. They sense a pervasive cultural and ethical emptinessrelated to the very institution of education to which their livesare committed. They resist this emptiness by offering an alterna-tive end to liberal education—call it democracy, humanity, orfaith—something other than research. Yet all supporters of liberaleducation are faced with an institutional history that is well doc-umented and that holds out little hope (but let us not say no hope)of successfully wooing the disciplines and departments that markuniversities and colleges to the ends of liberal education.

Since all of these authors are interested in liberal educationand in renewing its institutional life, it is not a fault that theyshould closely examine institutional histories of liberal education.But the origins of liberal-arts education were not entirely institu-tional. As I will argue shortly, before and even after the innova-tive congregating of lecturers into medieval universities,education in the liberal arts was often done outside an institu-tional context. This “outside” development matters because inone way or another almost all of our authors acknowledge insti-tutional atrophy at various points in the history of liberal educa-tion. And if, today, liberal-arts education is institutionally“strangled” rather than atrophied, that is all the more reason toexamine sources outside academe, or sources within academethat are not currently predominant in models of education, for in-spiration in renewing liberal-arts education. In particular, thetransition from Aquinas to Bacon has as its backdrop the rise ofuniversities—but the actual stage was filled with liberal artistsoutside of academia who were actively developing new educa-tions, arts, and sciences. The work of these liberal artists mayprovide us with generative—perhaps even transformative—mod-els, grounded in the classics, that can contribute appreciably toinstitutional revival of the liberal arts.


Through tracing the specific use of the words “liberal educa-tion” and “liberal arts,” Kimball concludes that, as a historicalfact, liberal education based in a normative curriculum of theseven liberal arts simply didn’t exist until the late RomanEmpire.10 Thus, the seven liberal arts, which eventually becamethe trivium and quadrivium, circumscribe what Kimball takeshistorically to be the instantiation of a liberal-arts curriculum.Under Roman development, the general artes liberales educa-tional ideal becomes firmly tied to “the goal of training the goodcitizen to lead society,” as well as to the “prescription of valuesand standards for character and conduct,” through this normativecurriculum.11 To cut a very complicated story short: this ideal andits primus-inter-pares art was rhetorical, and the situation re-mained so until the rise of the medieval university.12 That rise isaccompanied by the rise of philosophy as the organizing disci-pline of university education. Kimball finds that when medievaluniversities began to concentrate on theoretical matters or sys-tematic matters of philosophy, a “philosophic” curriculum re-placed an oratorical one.

This “revolution” and “transformation” is traced to “therediscovery and translation of the lost philosophical learningof Greek antiquity, especially the corpus of Aristotle . . . [aswell as] Arabic, Jewish and other Greek writings on mathe-matics and natural science.”13 But in Kimball’s analysis, thephilosophic takeover of the liberal-arts curriculum does notgive rise to a philosophic ideal associated with it that can bedescribed as a systematic ideal for liberal education. Onemight have expected the liberal arts to have been strengthenedby four developments that occurred during this time: the newrelative importance of logic; the rise of “technical andschematized artes”; the formation of “a curriculum of liberaleducation dedicated to scientiae speculativae” within me-dieval universities; and the innovation of grammatica specu-

10. Ibid., 3, 25, 29.11. Ibid., 37. 12. Ibid., 31-33.13. Ibid., 58, and 61.


lativa as an investigation of the universal grammar that “un-derlies the different grammars of all languages.” On the con-trary, the septem artes diminished in importance, largelyowing to Aquinas’s dictum that “the seven liberal arts do notsufficiently divide theoretical philosophy” and the emergenceof new studies in graduate programs. All of this led to a dis-tinct separation of the seven arts from philosophy within thecurriculum of new medieval universities.14 All of this leadsKimball’s argument to an unstated conclusion: the liberal artswere not being led by philosophy; they were slowly being triv-ialized or supplanted by it. To push the unstated conclusion astep further: despite many innovations in logic and grammar,as well as in mathematics, the scientiae speculativae that sup-planted the liberal arts were not really sciences in our modernsense. So, to read backwards from Kimball’s Enlightenmentidentification of the liberal-free ideal’s characteristics, the me-dieval rediscovery of the ancients seems not to have been anexercise in “freedom from a-priori strictures and standards”nor “a critical skepticism” linked to “scientific method.”15

On the other hand, the humanists’ interest in oratoricalskills allowed the liberal arts to flourish successfully outsidethe universities during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.Kimball finds, that beginning with Petrarch’s interest in Cic-ero and Quintilian, the artes liberales ideal leads to a revivaland spread of enthusiasm for literature among the general pub-lic, but a widespread revival of studying literary classics inthe curricula of universities did not take hold until the middleof the fifteenth century.16

A similar historical development occurred in the emer-gence of modern science, notwithstanding Newton’s appoint-ment at Cambridge, the pursuit of philosophy in the name ofthe New Science of Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, and Spinozaled to a blockade of natural philosophy from the curricula of

14. Ibid., 66 and 71.15. Ibid., 120-121.16. Ibid., 80.


universities. The philosophically based liberal-free idealemerges outside of the universities, relying for its support onwidespread Enlightenment attachment to freedom and ration-ality. The ideal does not shape curricula until it combines withthe re-organization of German universities under the researchprogram in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.That re-organization, in turn, leads to the destruction, in theU.S., of the more or less uniform liberal-arts curricula by thenineteenth century’s end.17 These historical threads, Kimballshows, are the roots of the two ideals that lay claim to the titleof liberal education. Infrequent and mostly unstable accom-modations between these two ideals, Kimball says, with a fewprecedents in the nineteenth century, only happened in thetwentieth.18

Since the rhetorical ideal and its foundational art, rhetoric,was excluded from universities in the twelfth and thirteenthcenturies, while the philosophical, liberal-free ideal and itsnew sciences were excluded from the sixteenth to nearly theend of the eighteenth centuries, the faculties shaping univer-sity curricula for long periods in the West have excluded oneor another version—or, at least, significant portion—of whatcould be termed “liberal education.” So then, we might ask, inthese periods where did liberal arts and liberal education go?

Kimball recognizes that humanists outside the universitieswere concerned, beyond politics, with the “development ofpersonality.”19 In Bruni’s fourteenth-century letter to LadyBattista Malatesta of Montefeltro on “the Study of Literature,”this shift has importance to the ideal, the curriculum, and thegoal of education. Bruni is addressing a woman who must, ofcourse, “leave the rough-and-tumble of the forum entirely tomen.” What, then, is she studying for? This turns out to be“human excellence,” which transcends the historical circum-stances of political life: “There is, indeed, no lack of examplesof women renowned for literary study and eloquence that I17. Ibid., 146.18. Ibid., 151, 153, 186, 221.19. Ibid., 78.


could mention to exhort you to excellence.” Here Bruni citesCornelia, Sappho, and Aspasia.20

The point of Bruni’s urging is to form a liberal education out-side the university and the common expectations of men.21 Inconsequence, Bruni does not recommend a technical study ofrhetoric, but rather a grammatical and broad “knowledge of sa-cred letters” (54), philosophy, and poetry. What Bruni is doing isexplicitly substituting for the Ciceronian, highly developed, tech-nical elaboration of rhetorical distinctions and artifices (no “prac-tice of the commonplaces” nor study of “knotty quaestiones tobe untied”) the broader literatures of history, philosophy, and po-etry, which are exercised in writing.22 While his treatise’s intel-lectual roots lie in grammatical considerations of such authors asAugustine and Isadore, Bruni is accomplishing a re-ordering ofliberal education that is new and innovative. It is neither directedtoward philosophy in the medieval sense, nor directed toward sal-vation in the Christian sense, nor directed toward statecraft andcitizenship in the Roman sense. The character one achieves is thatof a fine artist.

Invention is the principal organizing part of Ciceronian, andindeed Roman, rhetoric. Invention is the discovery or devisingof things, arguments or signs, to render a case probable or true(De Inventione, I, vi, 9). As such, invention is embedded in theartes liberales ideal. Commonplaces or topoi are central to in-vention and (De Topica, I, ii 7; De Partitione Oratoria I, ii, 9;xx, 68) one of principal technical features which dialectic shareswith rhetoric is the use of commonplaces or topoi.

These features of invention, discovery, and commonplaces,ultimately, suggest ground of accommodation between Kim-ball’s two ideals. Three works beyond Bruni may serve as ex-amples. Machiavelli’s Prince, in its operational concerns, its

20. Leonardo Bruni. “The Student of Literature To Lady Battista Malat-esta of Montefeltro,” in Humanist Educational Treatises, trans. Craig W.Kallendorf (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), 47-63.21. Ibid., 47-48.22. Ibid., 53, 55.


focus on the problem of new states, and its topical organizationof how to analyze a state or ruler’s situation falls well within thetraditions of expedience and invention characteristic of therhetorical tradition. Galileo’s Starry Messenger is the applicationof dialectical commonplaces derived from observation of nature.The moon is examined first as whole, which is light, and then asa whole which is dark; its parts are, then, divided into light anddark, and its boundaries into continuous and discrete.23 The entiretreatise continues in similar fashion as it produces its four majordiscoveries. Finally, Bacon, readily acknowledging in the NewOrganon that current philosophy and arts are “use[ful] for sup-plying matters for disputations or ornaments for discourse,” dis-tinguishes between “methods [of] cultivation” of those mattersand “invention of knowledge” which he is engaged in develop-ing.24 The sciences should be “methods for invention or directionsfor new works.”25 Yet, much of his analysis is directed less towardthe experimental manipulation of phenomena, than the re-order-ing of the mind, or “intellectual operations” by frameworks prop-erly adapted to nature.26 The analysis of the blocks to scientificprogress, occupying the first book of the New Organon, is pre-sented as a series of “aphorisms,” a dialectical term indicatingdefinitions or important distinctions. These aphorisms eithermove toward properly orienting the mind or showing that currentsystems of disputation, philosophy, and experience distract themind. Indeed, Bacon sounds something like Bruni, for he saysthat, “my purpose [is not to ‘found a new sect of philosophy’ but]to try whether I cannot . . . extend more widely the limits, of thepower and greatness of man.”27

By converting the principal part of rhetoric, invention, into its

23. Galileo Galilei. “The Starry Messenger,” in Discoveries and Opin-ions of Galileo, trans. and ed. by Stillman Drake (New York: Double-day, 1957), 21-58, esp. 31.24. Francis Bacon, “New Organon,” in Selected Philosophical Works,Indianapolis: Hackett, 1999), 63-206; 88, aphorism 8; 90.)25. Ibid., 90, aphorism 8. 26. Ibid., 92, aphorism 18.27. Ibid., 138, aphorism 118.


end, the aphorisms take on the character, not of persuasion or elo-quence, but discovery. The “Interpretation of Nature” in Book II,which is either to increase man’s powers over natures or to discoverthe form of a nature, is carried on in aphorisms. And, in illustratingdiscovery which is subsumed under the invention of knowledge,Bacon outlines a procedure of collecting physical instances, insteadof opinions, forming tables of instances (of the presence or absenceof the nature in question), and, then, applying “induction”—thatis, separation, inclusions, and exclusions of the sought for naturefrom other natures—based on the table of instances.28

Bacon criticized the arts and philosophies of his day as uselessin the production of knowledge. Galileo tired of “long and windydebates.” Machiavelli pitted imaginary constructions of politiesand ideal descriptions of human behavior against the usefulness ofhis treatise based in “realities.” Bruni not only found scholasticsubjects to be useless, but also clearly tried to provide a liberal ed-ucation for a woman while wondering whether the standard rhetor-ical arts educated men at all. I want to stress here that in the handsof these authors the liberal arts were essential in challenging andcriticizing the learning that came before. Yet, however much allthese authors argued their separation from the past or their differ-ences with current versions of education, none of their protests canobscure the continuity of art that tied the past to the present. So thetransition from Aquinas to Bacon was actually a roadway pavedby innovation as individuals attempted to extend the liberal artsinto many different areas—including, apparently, areas universitiessimply wouldn’t touch.

Now, Kimball acknowledges that the artes liberales ideal in-corporates a critical skepticism, yet, in the end, he concludes thatthis skepticism “misses the point of the scientific method: any con-clusions inferred become new hypotheses and are always subjectto challenge and criticism.”29 So, let us ask: While the hypothesis

28. Ibid., 178, aphorism 21.29. Kimball, Orators and Philosophers, 121, 172; see also 225-26. Thissame objection is reformulated in Kimball’s characterization of the mu-tual misunderstanding of each other’s position over the phrase “criti-cism of life” that Huxley and Arnold both employed.


may well be essential to the science of a liberal-free ideal, is it thehypothesis or, on the contrary, the continuous growth of knowledgethat is essential to the liberal-free ideal as a whole? Kimball wasnot the first to conclude that the German research universitychanged American institutions toward something like the liberal-free ideal. And research—not hypotheses or laboratories per se—is what changed higher education from within:

Visiting American graduate students and professors re-turned from German universities enamored of the spe-cialized scholarship, the commitment to speculativeresearch, and, above all, the atmosphere of freedomthey had seen in their host institutions. Particularly thislatter aspect—Lehrfreiheit (freedom to teach what onewishes) and Lernfreiheit (freedom to study what onewishes)—impressed the Americans. [The atmosphereof freedom] was seen “to follow from the searchingfunction, the presumption that knowledge was notfixed or final,” a presumption underlying all aspects ofthe idealized German university that the Americanstook to be “dedicated to a search to widen the boundsof knowledge rather than merely to preserve the storeof knowledge undiminished.”30

Thus, the question of whether hypotheses or the growth ofknowledge is essential to the liberal-free ideal is not without sig-nificance. The former, representing science, tends to draw a firmdistinction between the humanities and the sciences; the latter,representing the humanities, tends to admit that instances of sig-nificant mutual influence shape education. The former tends torestrict criticism to specialists. The latter tends to make criticismand critical thought dependent on broad views of knowledge.

If in their artistic inventions Bruni, Machiavelli, Galileo, andBacon were using the liberal arts, then, they were “proving op-posites.” But they were not simply constructing arguments op-posed to works of the past. They were constructing extensions of

30. Kimball, Orators and Philosophers, 161, quoting Carl Diehl, Amer-icans and German Scholarship: 1770-1870 (New Haven: Yale Univer-sity Press, 1978).


the arts they knew, the liberal arts. They thought that they werebreaking with a past of instruction and knowledge in the liberalarts; yet, because arts proceed by invention, not hypothesis, theseartists refashioned liberal-arts ends, principal parts, techniques,and devices, and made them suitable for new discoveries ofknowledge, new feats of action, new methods of production, newformations of character, and new explorations for expanding thebounds of human inquiry. In other words, invention is the char-acteristic response of the liberal arts to the project of continuingthe quest for knowledge. In our context, invention provided thebridge between old and new knowledge, while it simultaneouslyconstructed both the distinction between past and future, and alsothe distinction between the sciences and the humanities. Thus, inthe transition between Aquinas and Bacon, liberal-arts inventionprovided as much continuity as discontinuity. The foundation foran accommodation between the liberal-free ideal and the artesliberales ideal appears, therefore, to be inherent in the develop-ment of the New Philosophy or New Science, and, more deeply,inherent in the liberal arts themselves.31

The complex interrelations among the liberal-arts projectsof Bruni, Machiavelli, Galileo, and Bacon suggest that the placesto look for liberal education not only include institutional cur-ricula, but individual instances that evidence liberal learning or

31. In 2003, the Association of Core Texts and Courses began a three-year NEH grant, “Bridging the Gap Between the Humanities and Sci-ences.” The grant had three summer syllabi on “Motion and NaturalLaw in the Physical and Political World,” “Life, Origins, Purposive-nesss, and Transformations,” and “Technology, Art, Values, and theProblems of Technoscience.” All three syllabi began with ancient Greektexts; the first ended with texts of the seventeenth century; the othersended with later texts. Teams from ten institutions—each composed ofone humanist, one scientist, and one administrator drawn from any dis-cipline—attended the sessions and to their home institutions to devisecurricula and even teaching teams that “bridged the gap.” The wholeeffort was inconceivable without a liberal-arts orientation. Seehttp://www.coretexts.org/projects-and-grants/neh-grant-bridging-the-gap-between-the-humanities-and-sciences.


education. All of these authors were learning via the liberal arts;only one of them was doing it in a university, and he found fewwho embraced his extension of dialectical methods. No curricu-lum for women existed until Bruni devised one for Lady Battista.No widespread method of science existed until Bacon articulatedone. These examples of individuals practicing and acquiring lib-eral education outside of an academic institution show that an“artes liberales accommodation”—a synthesis of the artes lib-erales and liberal-free ideals of education— not only might haveoccurred earlier than we usually think, but also might have beenmore persistent and coherent in educational history than seemsapparent.

All of our authors demonstrate an acute awareness of thework of predecessors. Galileo is, of course, the patron saint ofscientists; and though Bacon may or may not capture the essenceof science, no one doubts he was advocating for what is recog-nized as modern science by first reviewing works and knowl-edge from the past. Thus, it was the liberal arts that first broughtus research in its nascent form, before it reached the universities.Is there, then, an illustration of humanities research requiringliberal education by an individual after research reaches the uni-versities? An example is depicted by Henry Adams in his book,The Education of Henry Adams.32 Adams was a man groomedby lineage and by a stale antebellum, Harvard liberal-arts edu-cation to become, later, one of America’s foremost specializedhistorians of the nineteenth century at his alma mater, during thevery time that Harvard made the transition from a college to aresearch university.33 Yet, the book’s first person narrativeshows that in the opening of his specialized historical study toany source of knowledge or human achievement, an openingwhich begins in the 1890’s well after his undergraduate educa-tion and his life as a professor had ended, Adams exhibits someof the finer uses of liberal-arts, core-text study. His service in32. Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams in Adams: Democ-racy, Esther, Mont Saint Michel and Chartres, The Education of HenryAdams (New York: The Library of America, 1983), 715-1181.33. Ibid., 777 and 993-997.


Great Britain during the American Civil War, followed bycomic revelations, some thirty years after the fact, by princi-pals of the British government about their real motives in con-sidering entering the war on behalf of the South in 1862,convinced Adams that private experience, or even, a researchcareer devoted to historical analysis of American Presidencies,was too small a scale for adequate judgment of the motives ofmen—or, what was the same, “a chart of history.”34 This con-viction was augmented, in part, by his friendship with JohnHay, the Secretary of State, who quickened Adams’s interestin the international scale of human relations—the true locus,Adams ultimately decides, that determines the motives ofhuman beings. Only as Adams moved from the local to the re-mote, only as he took an interest in symbols, only as he beganto study seriously not only politics, but science, art, religiousthought, and their core monuments—at Chartres, in the theol-ogy of Aquinas, in the dynamo, in the discoveries of Curie, inthe art of LaFarge—and added these to his store of diplomaticand governmental knowledge—only then did he discover theEducation of Henry Adams.35

The education Adams garnered at the end of his life was apreparation for a new theory, a new art, a new science—in thiscase a theory of history. But let us make a quick induction usingall of the authors we have discussed. The proper use of educa-tion, and particularly the liberal arts, is to render students capa-ble of making available to themselves the world’s culturalresources in order to construct a future. Adams’s employmentof cultural history as the means for his re-education suggests, asdo the works of our other authors, that no one should presupposeeducation begins with firm, well-grounded disciplinary assump-tions and then proceeds to the mastery of the discipline’s tools.Actually, it seems to be quite the opposite: if we are to offer stu-dents real education, then we are obliged to abandon the pre-sumption of given disciplines and construct a curriculum in

34. Ibid., 1105.35. Ibid., 1066ff and 1109ff.


which students may explore and conceive the foundations of dis-ciplines for themselves.36

In constructing such curricula, there is an obvious need for lib-eral-arts education to select core texts. This brings us back to sev-eral arguments mentioned earlier: namely, that ancient, medieval,and early modern moral teachings can be reduced to restraint; orthat a proper selection of texts can promote the correct democraticvalues and skills; or that the limitlessness of technology is destroy-ing our culture and character. Each of these serious arguments maybe true, but they simply don’t come close to expressing the fullnessthat a liberal-arts education can offer. The liberal arts have neverbeen merely moral, ethical, political, and cultural. They are funda-mentally inventive and transformative. We remember that Aeschy-lus disapproved so much of the blood-bath at the end of theOdyssey that he devised a tragic trilogy, the Oresteia, to celebratethe creation of the jury trial, in which justice, and not merely re-venge, could be felt by all. I recall the attempt in Plato’s Republicto replace Homer with philosophy, and rhetoric with dialectic asthe basis of education—and, perhaps, of society. We remember Ar-istotle writing—in a society that seemed unaware of human rightsin general, and of the right of expression in particular—a treatiseon art which defended its own governing principles. We recall thatthe Aeneid not only artfully incorporates the two Homeric epics,but also incorporates art into Aeneas’s education. In having Aeneasgaze upon the artfully wrought wall of Carthage, and upon Vul-can’s artfully wrought shield, and upon the artfully wrought beltof Turnus, Virgil incorporates art into the education of his hero—

36. I mean to suggest that by continuously returning to the principal partsof liberal arts—poetic and rhetorical invention, as well as dialectical dis-covery—the liberal arts and their associated core texts played a significantartistic role in developing the new philosophy or new science. In the sameway, they may continue to develop human innovation today. This argumentcan be extended across civilizations backward in time, and forward towardthe present-day sciences, particularly in their use of the humanities andliberal arts to explain themselves. Examples are: Darwin’s Origin ofSpecies; portions of Einstein’s The Meaning of Relativity; Skinner’s Be-yond Freedom and Dignity; Feynman’s QED; Wilson’s Consilience.


an education into a vast enterprise beyond his ken—in a way thatneither Homer nor most of the Biblical writers employ. We recallthe importance of books—scriptures—to ancient Jews and Chris-tians, not only in the canon that became the Bible, but in the re-markable synthesis of writers and texts that Ezra seems to haveread to the people of Jerusalem as he united them after their secondexile. We remember from the opening “archaeology” of Thucy-dides’s History of the Peloponnesian War the kind of works onereads matters. And we recall the sharp contrast between the Athen-ian virtues of Pericles’s “Funeral Oration” and the Judeo-Christianvirtues of Christ’s “Sermon on the Mount”—the importance of thesoul in each, together with the enormous differences of those soulsand their purposes. And we remember Augustine’s struggle withthe uses of the liberal arts and the wealth of pagan works his societypossessed as he came to be not only one of the greatest expositorsof the Bible, but also one of the chief agents who synthesizedAthens and Jerusalem into a single educated culture.

And so I think we arrive at a justification for great books orcore texts which is, perhaps, essential if our moral, cultural, polit-ical, or religious perceptions of the past’s resources are to be madeavailable to us in a way that is promising and fruitful. Often weread core texts from many disciplines to explore ideas as a way toenlarge student experience. This is laudable, but in exploring greatideas, it seems to me that we don’t want to lose the thread of ourown story—I mean the story of making books. This is the storyabout writing books, about reading and contemplating them, andabout building educations around them. As I have suggested above,the production of books is part of the larger story of made things,the story of art, technē. Technē has been a chief source of changein civilization almost since its inception, and if you want to learnhow and why culture, religion, literature, philosophy, morals, andscience change, you must read books of great depth and inventionacross genres, disciplines, cultures, and eras.37 When we do present

37. By a book I mean any written work that comes down to us, and which,of course, may be found in many different media—scrolls, velum, hyper-text, and someday, I suspect, something like holographic-imaging ipods.


the story of making books—and, more broadly, the story of devel-oping arts—and when we build an education around them, it is notonly our students who gain a powerful resource for building thefuture. We, the educators, do so as well.

Specific liberal arts are instantiations of technē, that intellectualvirtue concerned with making something out of the world of thevariable, bringing something into existence that otherwise mightnot be. And the essence of a liberal-arts education is the develop-ment of artistry in relation to making—technē in relation to poiēsis.Here we approach, at first, what are collectively known as the finearts. In a discussion of liberal education, literature has somethingof a pride of place in any list of fine arts because of the early devel-opment of the education fashioned by Isocrates and Cicero. Yet nei-ther Isocrates nor Cicero best capture what freedom of artistry isabout, as Aristotle did in the final chapters of the Poetics. Through-out the Poetics an argument builds that poetry is something morephilosophic—more general—than history, and that, indeed, its func-tion is not to narrate or dramatize “the thing that has happened, buta kind of thing that might happen, i.e., what is possible” [italicsmine] (1451a 36). The argument continues to the end with a defenseof poets and poetry against the challenges of philosophers, politi-cians, and technical disciplinarians who in their systems and edu-cational plans always tie art to the truth. Aristotle reminds us thatthe standard of correctness “is not the same . . . in poetry (poiētikēs)as in politics or, indeed, in any other art (technē).” Indeed, if, an“error” in any art object was useful, if the poet meant to “describe[a thing] in some incorrect way . . . [so that] it serves the end of po-etry itself,” then objections by other disciplines about the productor the artistry are really to no avail. This is even the case in moralquestions, for in the Poetics Aristotle’s interest in poetry is notwhether an action or character conforms to a specific ethical or po-litical system, or models or cultivates a specific character in the au-dience; his interest is in what to consider when answering whether“something said or done in a poem is morally right or not.” That is,he is concerned with “intrinsic qualities of the actual word or deed,”as well as the agent, the purpose, the patient, the means, the time,and the relations of the actions to greater or lesser goods or evils.


More generally, then, Aristotle’s Poetics is far less concerned withconstructions that use rhythm, language, and harmony as mattersof truth, than as matters of what might be: “If the poet’s descriptionbe criticized as not true to fact, one may urge perhaps that the objectought to be as described—an answer like that of Sophocles, whosaid that he drew men as they ought to be” (1460b33-35).

In the Poetics, Aristotle takes poetry’s side by constructing adialectical defense. The defense depends on a criticism which in-vestigates poetry in its own terms, that is, in the internal functioningof its products. In this sense, when we come to consider the con-struction of curricula of books, the Poetics, notwithstanding Aris-totle’s statements about liberal education in his Politics, structuresa liberal-arts education and promotes the free character that it pro-duces, for such an education is less a study of the truth, than of thepossibilities humans have invented and made for themselves.

The point is extendable to all books, as well as to literature andartistry from any discipline. Thus, a similar point about the objectof a liberal education is suggested by Aristotle for “literary” con-structions such as Bruni’s, Machiavelli’s, Galileo’s, and Bacon’s.Aristotle makes a distinction in his Parts of Animals between “twodistinct kinds of proficiency”: “scientific knowledge” and “educa-tional acquaintance” with any subject. Indeed, the mark of a “uni-versal [i.e, general] education” is for the holder of such an educationto “to be able to form a fair offhand judgment as to the goodness orbadness of the method used by a professor in his exposition.” Andthis acquired ability applies to “all or nearly all branches of knowl-edge” (639a1-10). Subsequently, Aristotle constructs a dialecticalset of questions pertaining to characteristics of animals and theprocesses which lead to the formation of those characteristics, aswell as a review of how earlier authors had treated both character-istics and processes. And, indeed, he analogizes this treatment aris-ing out of general education to analyses of art (640a25-33). In sum,tracing the invention of fine arts or sciences or the characteristicsand foundations of such arts and sciences relies on a process of“criticism” (kritikon) “quite independent of the question whetherthe statements [in a work] be true or false” (639a14-15). What is atstake educationally is knowledge of the available and variable


means of construction for any given art or science. This is whatfreedom in artistry is. Education needs institutions and curricula inwhich students can acquire the arts that make such constructionsavailable.

I have used Bruce Kimball’s distinctions between the artes lib-erales and liberal-free ideals and traditions of education to suggestthat the accommodations in higher education during the late nine-teenth and twentieth centuries may have stronger, longer, more con-tinuous historical foundations than seem apparent from educationaldocuments and curricula created during the same period. So far we have seen that the principal parts of the liberal arts—rhetorical invention and dialectical discovery—played a significantartistic role in developing the new philosophy or new science ideal.Furthermore, we have seen that the long tradition of the liberal artsis concerned with transformative arts, ideas, and culture. And, fi-nally, we have seen that the free character of a liberal artist is notonly a propaedeutic for research, but also a source of invention andimagination for the future.

Each of these considerations seems to have implications for thefuture of the liberal arts in research universities and colleges. If it isplausible that the liberal-arts accommodation—that is, recognizableliberal-arts curricula, innovation, and a productive, but not stifling,link to research—has stronger, systematic ties to education thanmight be suspected, then we should see these ties in histories of in-stitutions, as well as in analyses of the place of liberal-arts educationup to the current time.38 Kimball focuses on the liberal-arts influ-

38. Certainly, Kimball’s analysis that a artes liberales accommodationhad real intellectual impetus and some institutional steam by the end ofthe nineteenth century is right. Indeed, I think Adams is an individualinstance. But because faculties in the early modern era used to excludeeither the artes liberales ideal or the research ideal, educational histo-rians should not expect to find many instantiations of institutional artesliberales accommodations until sufficient “steam” develops. Nonethe-less, there was some inherent intellectual “inertia” for an accommoda-tion much further back in history than the nineteenth century, and thatinertia, while not a driving force, is still significant for institutions evenat the beginning of the twenty-first century.


ences of a complex of three related universities and colleges—Co-lumbia, Chicago, and St. John’s. Although he analyzes them quitesympathetically and sensitively, he nevertheless regards them asunsuccessful accommodations—not because their programsfoundered, but because their models failed to spread widely, andwhen they did spread, they tended not to persist.

Let me take Chicago as my example in this regard, and discussthe opinions of two key figures in its relation to core texts and lib-eral arts: Richard McKeon and Leo Strauss.

Strauss first. To cut very short his very complex analysis ofliberal education: the history of Western culture is the history ofsolving the problems of governance in a democracy, ultimatelyby creating a democratic aristocracy of citizens educated in theircountry’s and culture’s intellectual traditions of political scienceand freedom. The current problems of governance involve pro-viding wisdom to guide the technological and dehumanizing in-fluences of modern science and systematic tyranny. The greatbooks stand as a bulwark in this fight: through them, citizens candiscuss what they should value. For researchers like Strauss, thehistorical investigation he outlines is education: “education is ina sense the subject matter of my teaching and research.” Politicalscience is the science of liberal education.39

For McKeon, the Chicago approach to general eduction—which is to say, the university approach—is grounded in disci-plines and relates them through broadening and widening arts,methods, ideas, and even sciences. The innovation at Chicagowas not that professors were to survey ever wider swaths of sub-jects. Nor was it that a professor was to give courses in highlydeveloped specialized methods that were then to be applied topreviously unsuspected areas of study. Rather, the innovation wasthat, to broaden the context in faculty discussions of the so-calledhumanities, “the methods employed and developed were the lib-

39. This admittedly truncated summary is derived from “Liberal Educa-tion and Responsibility,” in Liberalism Ancient and Modern (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1995), 9-25, and “What Is Liberal Educa-tion?”, ibid., 1-8.


eral arts.” Those discussions, using different liberal arts, werenecessarily interdisciplinary. In other words, they related one lib-eral art to another, or one formulation of a discipline to another,via the liberal arts. For McKeon, general education implied pur-poseful interdisciplinary attempt to unify the fractured humanisticsubjects and departments through methodical (which is to say,artful) inquiry—even when disciplines disagreed on what wassaid about their subjects.40 The point of McKeon’s discussion ofthe Chicago new college was that the design of the college, im-plied by Hutchins’s stated design of the general education he out-lined in the Higher Education in America, was to transformgraduate schools and the organization of their disciplines, eventheir research, through general education.41 In these ways, McK-eon’s education orders a free character, but the ordering is toknowledge, not to wisdom, or prudence, or even citizenship. Inboth cases, the liberal-free ideal was accommodated to the artesliberales ideal in that the liberal arts were being used to invigor-ate research and curricula, not the other way around.

The varieties of Chicago curricula and programs, the con-ceptions of liberal education that arose out of the different di-visions, and the faculty who met there and migrated elsewherecreated a pluralism of ideas about liberal-arts education throughgreat books or core texts. These different visions have generateda plethora of liberal-arts developments in institutions aroundthe world. To point to just a few: Shimer College, Saint Mary’sCollege of California, the University of Notre Dame’s Programof Liberal Studies, Thomas Aquinas College, the University ofDallas, the Erasmus Institute, the Liberal Arts College of Con-cordia University in Montreal, the Chinese University of Hong

40. Richard McKeon, “Criticism and the Liberal Arts: The ChicagoSchool of Criticism” in Profession 1982, ed. Phyllis P. Franklin andRichard I. Brod, (New York: Modern Language Association, 1982), 2-4.41. I have argued this more thoroughly, both in a speech given at Marro-quín University (see note 44 below), and in a speech delivered in the Pub-lic Lecture Series at Shimer College: “Re-thinking Universities andHutchins: Faculty and Student Resistance to Core Text Curricula,” whichcan be found on the web at http://j.mp/j-scott-lee-at-schimer-college.


Kong, and Boya College of Sun-Yatsen University are all ofthem in some way closely or distantly intellectually, education-ally, and personally related to the three institutions mentionedabove. All of these institutions have had self-reflective facultywho have published materials on some aspect of liberal-arts ed-ucation. One of them, The University of Dallas, developed agreat books program in literature unrelated to Chicago/Colum-bia/St. John’s, and then welcomed Straussians to teach in theircore. All of them have different configurations of curricula, dif-ferent internal organizations, different purposes for a baccalau-reate, and different relations between general education andresearch.42 The accommodationist ideal has, in fact, stimulated

42. Prior to arriving at Chicago, McKeon and Mortimer Adler were in-volved together at Columbia with the professors who developed the Con-temporary Civilization core sequence and, later, the Literature-Humanitiescore sequence. Ultimately, each of these sequences replaced the depart-mental offerings of general education courses that, in the early twentiethcentury, had preceded the requirements for graduation from Columbia.To this day, Columbia offers a bachelor’s degree without a major. ScottBuchanan was involved in adult education spin-offs of Columbia in NewYork City before he and Hutchins came to Chicago to develop liberaleducation programs. Saint John’s College developed, partly, out of thiscomplex of institutions and personalities. St. John’s curriculum entirelyeschewed the departmental-disciplinary basis of the Chicago program,while it retained the liberal arts, and it explicitly identified its programwith the great books and authors of the Western world. In 1953, NotreDame, in large part through the work of Otto Byrd, whose teachers in-cluded Adler, McKeon, and Etienne Gilson (Otto Byrd, My Life as AGreat Bookie, [San Francisco : Ignatius Press, 1991], 46 ff. and 66ff.)organized a three-year major called the Program of Liberal Studies onthe basis of disciplinary courses that stretch across all the fields foundat Chicago; but Notre Dame retained the idea of interdisciplinary readingseminars that characterized St. John’s program. A 1941 article by Adler,delivered to the American Catholic Philosophical Association’s WesternDivision, on “The Order of Learning” (in The Moraga Quarterly [Au-tumn 1941]: 3-25) sparked at first a short-lived attempt (1943-44) andthen the enduring establishment of classics-based liberal-arts educationprograms at Saint Mary’s College of California; this ultimately resulted


the invention of institutions and innovative programs that areenormously different. Rhodes College’s “Search” courses (for-merly “Man” courses) and Yale University’s Directed StudiesProgram illustrate innovations not depending on personal con-

in a St. John’s-like program for a major, alongside a four-semester greatbooks program taken by those who majored in a discipline. (See WhatIs It To Educate Liberally? Essays by Faculty and Friends of St. Mary’sCollege [St. Mary’s College: Office of the President, 1996], 1-28).Though modified, both programs are still running. Shimer Collegeadopted one version of the Chicago-Hutchins, or “new college,” curricu-lum, but it has no departments and, for the baccalaureate, only four gen-eral concentrations, including one in science; it has carefully stagedintegrative courses and requirements in every year of its curriculum.

Straussians graduated from Chicago and went, in particular, to theUniversity of Dallas. There, in conjunction with literary specialists whoformed a core sequence of genre studies unrelated to political sciencethat was conceived by Louise and Donald Cowan (who were in turn in-fluenced by southern critics at Vanderbilt), the university faculty formeda disciplinary core leading to majors that had no interdisciplinary coursesbut was founded on great books. This new curriculum transformed theeducation at that institution. The University of Dallas founded the onlygraduate program explicitly using the Western Great Books, which offersthree PhDs in political science, philosophy, and literature. Its graduatesnot only have staffed institutions across America, but also have helpedto re-organize the New England Political Association so that there is a“core text/political philosophy” section of the Association’s annual meet-ing that contributes more than a third of the papers at the meeting.

Meanwhile, at Columbia, William Theodore deBary rejected Adler’sand Hutchin’s contention that great books education had to consist onlyof books from the Western tradition. For over fifty years, and continuingto this day, deBary has translated or collaborated in the translation ofChinese texts, and has argued for the inclusion of these texts in somecourses of the Columbia core. Although his work took place during theperiod when China has risen to threaten the U.S. while at the same timedestroying its own cultural traditions in the Great Leap Forward and theCultural Revolution, deBary’s work has no tinge of cultural superiorityabout it, for it is not rooted in Greek education or Enlightenment politicalphilosophy as is Strauss’s. In so far as he is concerned with the core pro-gram at Columbia, deBary wishes to “liberate the powers of the indi-


tact with the complex of institutions above, but emerging ratherfrom an awareness of problems and solutions in general educa-tion.43

vidual by disciplining them” (Kimball, Orators and Philosophers, 4).His work is part of a larger effort by the University Committee on Asiaand the Middle East to incorporate Chinese, Indian, and Islamic textsinto the core, as well as to develop sophisticated research programs. St.John’s, motivated by its own experience in teaching great works, hasalso developed at its Santa Fe campus a masters degree in Eastern Clas-sics, reading and discussing Indian and Chinese texts. In 1978, FrederickKranz, a graduate of Columbia, along with Harvey Shulman and GeoffFidler, establish a three-year liberal-arts baccalaureate college foundedon the Western great books tradition at Concordia University in Mon-treal. In the Far East, the Chinese University of Hong Kong, under thedirection of Cheung Chan Fai and Mei Yee Leung, recently developeda two-course sequence in the humanities and sciences based on greattexts of the West and East, which owes part of its development both toChicago and to Columbia. This program provides a selection of generaleducation courses to fulfill the Chinese government’s mandate thathigher education institutions convert from the European, specialist,three-year baccalaureate to the American, mixed, four-year baccalaure-ate. This list of institutions shows almost all the related forms and affilia-tions of the accommodated liberal-arts ideal as it is beginning to spreadfrom North America into the wider world. And yet this list hardly enumer-ates the whole network of core text programs found worldwide, nor doesit describe the role of the liberal arts in actually shaping that network.43.Michael Nelson, ed., Celebrating the Humanities: A Half-Century ofthe Search Course at Rhodes College (Nashville: Vanderbilt UniversityPress, 1996), 3-31, begins with a post-World War I narrative of CharlesDiehl’s attempts to bring liberal education to Southwestern (now Rhodes)College between the 1920s and 1950s. This program was based in Chris-tian traditions, but with an awareness of the educational innovations atColumbia, Chicago, and Vanderbilt. Justin Zaremby’s Directed Studiesand the Evolution of American General Education (New Haven: TheWhitney Humanities Center of Yale University, 2006), 32ff., says thatMaynard Mack, educated entirely at Yale, helped to devise and found theprogram with Dean William Clyde DeVane. Mack was seeking to solvethe problems of “choice” that had arisen in general education, which werethe cause of the differences between Hutchins and Dewey.


To a large extent, the Association of Core Texts and Courses(ACTC) is a result of these accommodations and innovations.44

There have been two chief vehicles for ACTC’s growth, both re-lated to the liberal arts. The annual Conference is the first vehicle,the Liberal Arts Institute, the second. As a pluralist, my goal asdirector of ACTC has been to maintain cross-disciplinary, gen-eral-education discussions notwithstanding higher education’shabits of narrow disciplinarity. Part of what is at stake in havingsuch discussions is fairly obvious: faculty members get exposedto ways of thought about their own disciplines that they will

44. A precursor to this paper was delivered as a speech entitled “Accom-modating the Core Texts Tradition of Liberal Arts in Today’s Universi-ties: History, ACTC, and Marroquín—An International Phenomenon,”to the faculty of Marroquín University in Guatemala, in September of2012. At this point in the text, the speech noted that “the Associationfor Core Texts and Courses was co-founded by Stephen Zelnick andmyself in 1995 in order to bring together programs that used commonreadings, taught in common courses, by shared faculty. The idea wasoriginally Zelnick’s, who was Director of Temple University’s Intellec-tual Heritage Program—a two course sequence of texts from the sci-ences, social sciences, and humanities stretching from ancient tomodern times required of every Temple undergraduate. He had discov-ered that the wide variety of professional associations at the time didnot really address educational issues of these kinds of programs. As theorganization grew, it encouraged faculty and institutions to develop anduse their own core text programs in their own fashion for their own in-stitutional missions. . . .

After the first organizing conference, under my direction, ACTCconferences took on the following structure: originally, paper proposalswere organized into panels over two days with each session exclusivelydevoted to one of four categories: Interdisciplinary Questions, Science,Social Science, or the Arts & Humanities, accordingly characterized bytexts, problems, or disciplines discussed—but not by faculty presenters.That is, if you were a humanist and wished to address Newton’s Prin-cipia, that was fine. After about seven years, the membership voiced adesire to have panels of the four categories appear in each session. Gen-erally, this movement by the membership was an effort to allow con-ferees to attend the fields, perhaps the disciplines, which they were mostcomfortable with.”


rarely encounter at disciplinary conferences. Another part of whatis at stake is a little more subtle, though it can be found in almostall the works I have discussed. Many core texts serve a dual rolein intellectual history: on the one hand, they help to found or ar-ticulate a discipline; on the other hand, their ideas, deep-seatedattitudes, or basic techniques migrate across disciplines. This istrue in regard both to Eastern and Western texts. So, for both ofthese reasons, the determination to keep discussing great texts atACTC conferences plays an essential role in maintaining the lib-eral-arts orientation of the organization.

ACTC does not have a list of canonical texts that must be ad-dressed in papers read at its conferences, though the “usual sus-pects” among ancient and modern authors frequently appear onits panel sessions. There is an insistence that every paper addressa core text for at least three quarters of a page in a five-pagepaper.45 The treatment of the text is up to the conferee. But whatis most important is whether a given text within a proposal, or aset of texts within a collection of proposals, will spark an ex-change of ideas about the ideas themselves, and about the pro-grams, the texts, the teaching, or other matters of liberal-artsconcern. This is a matter of perception, not a matter of doctrine,established argument, or disciplinary governance. It is frankly re-markable how many panels actually cohere quite well using textsas the starting point for potential inquiry and discussion—whether the panels are disciplinary or interdisciplinary in focus.

ACTC is filled with accomplished scholars and teachers, butit exists to promote conversations about texts among facultymembers across institutions, programs, and disciplines. Here weenter a fertile field deeply furrowed by a distinction Bruce Kim-ball discusses at the beginning of Orators and Philosophers: thedistinction between ratio and oratio. Disciplinary conferences

45. ACTC has published to date ten selected, peer-reviewed proceed-ings. Seven more are in various states of pre-publication. It also helpedto support the publication of Bruce Kimball’s The Liberal Arts Tradi-tion: A Documentary History (Lanham, Maryland: University Press ofAmerica, 2010), which made selections of core texts in the traditionavailable to a wider public.


exist to offer extended versions of the ratio of a discipline—longpapers and complex panel sessions marked by highly specializedarguments, and offering little actual time for serious questioningand discussion. ACTC’s conferences exist for a quite differentreason. The first sentence of Aristotle’s Rhetoric is, “Rhetoric isthe counterpart of dialectic.” The Greek word translated here as“counterpart” is antistrophē—as in the return dance of the chorusthat leads to their exit from the stage. This, of course, makes di-alectic into the strophe, and this has important implications forthe relation of these two verbal arts. First, one needs to knowwhich direction one is headed in. This is not always easy to figureout, given the nature of language and the closeness of the twoarts. Because the intention of the conferences is to produce seri-ous discussion around the seminar table, the brevity of the papersleaves the direction of the conversation open. Second, even if apresenter’s argument is either mainly rhetorical or mainly dialec-tical, the ensuing conversation will likely lead, at least, to reflec-tions on what the argument would look like from the viewpointof the other art. Since there is no list of canonical works and nostandard set of disciplinary preconceptions that contain conver-sations within pre-set boundaries, ACTC presenters are asked atleast to consider a rationale for why their text should be consid-ered a world classic or a text of major cultural significance. Ifthis defense were being made to a disciplinary audience, it mightwell be entirely dialectical, since the audience already agrees onthe basic outlines of what belongs within the discipline’s bound-aries. But because the audience at ACTC’s conferences are inter-disciplinary, such defenses must be at least partly rhetorical,insofar as it is aimed at persuading listeners from many disci-plines to consider a text for inclusion in a liberal-arts program.Even here, however, such a defense would become dialectical ifit focuses on what the liberal arts, a discipline, a text, or an ideacontributes to our understanding of education.

At the close of Orators and Philosophers, Kimball makes awell pointed observation: In the academy “there is rarely a recog-nition that the means to accomplish the resuscitation of the com-munity of learning lie in elevating and emphasizing the study of


expression, rhetoric, and the textual tradition of the community.Yet the means are self-evident. A community is, after all, a groupof people who talk to each other and do it well. This view of com-munity was dear to Socrates, no less than to Cicero.”46 This iswhat ACTC promotes: the opportunity for faculty members,through the liberal arts and its traditions across all disciplines, toco-operate in discussing, planning, and implementing general-ed-ucation curricula. It is very much interested in oratio, in the ex-pression of thought, communicated to others, that concerns itselfwith the available resources of intellectual traditions across dis-ciplines and cultures, and with the invention of educational pro-grams that transmit the arts of absorbing and using thoseresources. Its continuing mission is to join with all those who sharethese aims to promote the invention, enrichment, and developmentof more core text, liberal-arts programs in universities and collegesof the future.

46. Kimball, Orators and Philosophers, 240.

Definition and Diairesisin Plato and AristotleJon Lenkowski

The understanding of the essential definition that has come downto us in modern times is traceable to Aristotle’s account of horis-mos in Book II of the Posterior Analytics. That is, we understand,as Aristotle did, that by defining something, we “capture” it insuch a way that the definition completely “encloses” what is de-fined and delimits it from other things.

But common opinion—everyday understanding—makes amuch bolder claim, namely, that we only know something whenwe have defined it and that, correspondingly, to define somethingis to specify its nature, its essence, its whatness—to say, in otherwords, what it is. Is this claim legitimate?

We know this question, “What is something?” to be peculiarto Socrates; in fact we call it the Socratic question. To ask myquestion about the legitimacy of common opinion’s claim, then,in a somewhat different way: Was Socrates, in asking just thisvery specific question, looking for a definition? Does the ques-tion “What is something?” seek a definition? And, conversely,does definition give us the “what is” of something, the “what is”of the thing defined?

In Book II of the Posterior Analytics Aristotle says, “defini-tion is thought to be [italics mine] of the ‘what is’.” (“Horismostou ti estin einai dokei.” [90b4]). And again: “Since definition issaid to be an account of the ‘what is’. . . .” (“Horismos d’epeidē

Jon Lenkowski is a tutor emeritus at St. John’s College in Annapolis.

This essay was presented as a lecture at St. John’s College and else-where. The author is especially indebted to Seth Benardete, StewartUmphrey, Peter Widulski, and Robert Williamson who were kindenough to read one or another version of the essay over the years andoffer helpful advice.

47

legetai einai logos tou ti esti. . . ” [93b29]. Italics in translationfrom the Greek are the author’s.) But if definition is not onlythought to give the “what is” of something, but also really doesgive it, then there ought to be no difficulty at all in answering the“what is” question. Yet finding an adequate answer to this questionparticularly is just what the dialogues present as the most difficultof tasks. And this may indicate that a “definition” is not, after all,what the question is asking for.

What exactly is it that definition attempts and what does itactually accomplish? What exactly is it that definition gains forus? What exactly is it that we do when we “define” something?Precisely what is it that we know (or think we know) when wepossess the definition of something? An examination of this clus-ter of questions ought to show that “definition” must fail to meetwhatever demand the “what is” question is making upon us.

A horismos is the result of a horizein, a “bounding” or limit-ing. A horismos is thus that within which the defined is contained;it is the outline of the thing. But in so limiting, the horismos “de-limits,” or sets off, the defined from other things. Thus it is thathorismos is translated by “definition” (Latin definitio): a “de-fin-ing” is literally a de-limiting. Does delimiting give us the “whatis”? To answer this question we must first turn from Aristotle toPlato; for horismos understood as a delimiting derives directlyfrom the Platonic “division” (diairesis). Diairesis is a dividingwith begins with some rather comprehensive class (genos) andends in a horismos, which is also a class, though a very limitedone. Sophist 219a-221c provides an example of such a division:Here Theaetetus and the Eleatic Stranger are preparing to huntdown the sophist, to discover what the sophist is. The Strangerhas a “method” for the hunt (namely, division), but he thinks that,before hunting something as difficult as the sophist (they havehim only in name at the outset [218c]), they ought to practice thismethod by first hunting something “easier”; and he proposes “theangler” as their practice quarry. Fig. 1 is a schematic presentationof the steps that hunt and capture the angler by division.

As the scheme shows, it takes nine divisions to capture thequarry. It should also be noticed that in the fourth division there is


49ESSAYS & LECTURES | LENKOWSKI

Art (Techne)

Productive Acquisitive

By Exchange By Capture orCoercion

(Openly)Disputation/Fighting

(In secret)Hunting

Of LifelessThings

Of Living Things(specifically

animals)

Of LandAnimals

Of FluidAnimals

Of Winged Animals(Fowling)

Of Water-boundAnimals (Fishing)

By Enclosures By Striking

Daytime(Barb-

hunting)

At Night(Fire-hunting)

With Spears: ProceedingDownward from Above

(Tridentry)

With Hooks: ProceedingUpward from Below

(Angling)

1

2

3

4

5

6

7

8

9

Fig. 1: Division of the Angler

an abrupt shift from procedure to object sought, and that in theseventh division there is an abrupt shift back to procedure.Should we be troubled by the fact that no justification at all isgiven for these two shifts? There may indeed be other peculiari-ties about this and the other examples of presented by the dia-logues. We will return to some of these peculiarities in a shortwhile.

It is the diairesis that progressively tightens the enclosure;the horismos is the final enclosure, the enclosure brought to itstightest possible state—this being determined both by the startingpoint and by the manner in which the division was executed.

Four dialogues give accounts of diairesis: 1. Phaedrus 264e-266b; 2. Sophist 219a-221c (id. 221d, ff. and 264c ff.); 3. States-man 258b, ff.; 4. Philebus 16c-17a. Sophist and Statesmanprovide by far the lengthiest illustrations, but Phaedrus andPhilebus give the most succinct generalized accounts.1 There are,in the dialogues, two prescriptions for division: 1. to divide ac-cording to eide, according to the “natural joints” (kat’arthra), try-

1. There are numerous studies of diaresis. The following have been con-sulted in writing this essay: A.C.Lloyd, “Plato’s Description of Divi-sion” in Studies in Plato’s Metaphysics, ed. R.E.Allen (New York:Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1965), 219-230. Seth Benardete, “PlatoSophist 223bl-7” in Phronesis 5 (1960): 129-139. Seth Benardete,“Eidos and Diaeresis in Plato’s Statesman” in Philologus 107: 3/4(1963) 193-226. Jakob Klein, “On Precision” in Lectures and Essays,ed. Robert Williamson and Elliott Zuckerman (Annapolis: St. John’sCollege Press, 1985), 289-308. Jakob Klein, Plato’s Trilogy (Chicago:University of Chicago Press, 1977), Parts 2 and 4. Julius Stenzel, Stu-dien zur Entwicklung der platonischen Dialektik (Leipzig: Teubner,1931), especially ch. 4-8. Julius Stenzel, Zahl und Gestalt bei Platonund Aristoteles (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1959),especially ch. 2-4, 6. J. B. Skemp, Plato’s Statesman (London: Rout-ledge & Kegan Paul, 1952), 66-82. G.E.R. Lloyd, Polarity and Analogy(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1966), 148-161. Francis M.Cornford, Plato’s Theory of Knowledge (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill,1957), 184-187. Reginald Hackforth, Plato’s Phaedrus (Indianapolis:Bobbs-Merrill, n.d.), 131-137. Reginald Hackforth, Plato’s Examinationof Pleasure (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1970, repr.) 20-24.


ing not to break any part (Phaedrus 265e1-3); 2. to cut “throughthe middle” (dia meson), which is the safest way, and the waymore likely to find ideai (Statesman 262b6-7, e3; 265a4-5).

In the Prior Analytics (46a-b) and in the Posterior Analytics(91b ff.), Aristotle presents an objection to the use of diairesis indemonstration, on the grounds that diairesis does not give the tiēn einai of something, but really gives two exclusive alternatives(that is, an exclusive disjunction); those who use it as a methodof proof, however, do not treat this as a disjunction but, discard-ing one side of the division, they really assume already what theythink they are in the process of proving. But, though he criticizesdiairesis as a method of proof or demonstration, he neverthelessallows that it can be useful in reaching a horismos—as long asthe division is made, at each stage, into opposites which have nointermediates (an ēi antikeimena hōn mē esti metaxu [PosteriorAnalytics 97a21-22]), for this would be the only way to assurethe exhaustion of the genus. The divisions as actually carried outby example in the dialogues, however, do not remain true to theseprescriptions. This not only suggests a disparity between the pre-scriptions as “ideals” and the concrete application of this“method,” but, even more important, it calls into question theprescriptions themselves.2

As for Phaedrus’s prescriptions, where are the “naturaljoints”? Would it be possible to determine these with any cer-tainty? Or would such a determination of these “natural joints”be itself already a dividing? Would it be itself already having per-formed the division? And then what would be the prescriptionfor this division? To begin with some genus and divide it into its“natural joints” would, moreover, seem to presuppose a priorknowledge of the genus and of its internal differentiation. Butthen what would the division itself accomplish?

2. See Lloyd, Polarity and Analogy, 149-150. On the impreciseness ofthe divisions in the Statesman, see Skemp, Plato’s Statesman, 71-72and Benardete, “Eidos and Diaeresis in Plato’s Statesman,” 196 ff. Onthe impreciseness of the division in the Sophist, see Benardete, “PlatoSophist 223bl-7.” On the impreciseness of diairesis in general, seeKlein, “On precision,” 295-302.


As for Statesman’s prescription, how could you ever be cer-tain that you had “cut through the middle”? At Sophist 220a6-8,for example, is the division of animal into land-animal and fluid-animal (neustikon) made “through the middle” of animal? Howindeed could we be sure that we had cut through the middle? Canwe be certain that such a cut would not be into a “greater” and a“lesser”? How could we know where the “middle” is? There areinnumerable ways of dividing the class animal into two. Whatbearings do we have for determining which—if any—of thesecuts through the middle? Of all the possible ways of dividing an-imal into two, what tells us to divide according to the particulardivision between land-animal and fluid-animal? Would this di-vision even be possible, unless we were directed to do so by thevery object of our search—that is, unless our procedure wereguided already from the outset by the object we are seeking? Butif we already know this, then what does the division accomplish?Furthermore—supposing one could do it—why should divisioncut through the middle in the first place? Is it so certain that thisis the most advisable and the safest procedure?

As for Aristotle’s prescription, how could we be certain thatwe had made an exhaustive and exclusive dichotomy at each stepin the division? In order to do this, wouldn’t we have to know al-ready the genus and its inner differentiation? And then whatwould the division accomplish?

In the Sophist something curious happens. In hunting downthe sophist, the initial division had been made in terms of hunt-ing—and yet this category comes to be abandoned completely,for the sophist comes to be understood ultimately in terms ofimage-making (eikastikē), and not at all in terms of hunting. Inthe Statesman too, one of the divisions is made in terms of nur-turing herds—yet this is abandoned, and the statesman comes tobe understood in terms of weaving. But why doesn’t where weend up reflect where we began? What has happened to the rigorof method here? Why are we being led so unambiguously to see


3. Skemp, Plato’s Statesman, 67 ff., claims (correctly, I believe) thatStatesman’s account of diairesis is really the Platonic criticism of it asa “method.” Klein, “On Precision,” 301-302, suggests that the excesses

the defects in this “method” called diairesis?3

All of these questions remain unanswered, both in the pre-scriptive and in the illustrative accounts of diairesis. This makesthe procedure questionable, even suspect. And it makes us askexactly what it is that diairesis does do. And if this “ procedure”starts to look like a spurious one, then we have to ask why it isput forth in the dialogues at all.

In an attempt to answer this question, let me rehearse whathappens in the early divisions made by the Stranger and Theaete-tus in the Sophist.

In tracking the sophist-as-salesman (223b9-224e5), thesophist suddenly shows up as a “maker of soul-goods” (224d7),thereby collapsing the original distinction (219a8-c9) betweenacquisition and making—between those arts which gather andthose which make.4 Earlier, in tracking the sophist-as-hunter(221c5-223b7), the sophist suddenly shows up as a “hunter-for-pay” (222d7), whereby he has slid over into the class of salesman,from which hunting had been originally distinguished. Thus thesophist constantly switches classes, indicating that the divisionsmade by this so-called “method” were not precisely made.

In thus sliding over into the class of salesman, moreover, heis not forced completely out of the class of hunting; he is now intwo classes previously distinguished as exclusive of one another,but is not completely either of them. The Stranger says that thesophist’s art is a “many-sided” one (223cl-2). And within the sell-ing art itself, he turns up in three distinct classes: 1. as a mer-chandiser of soul-goods; 2. as a retailer of soul-goods made byothers; and 3. as a retailer of soul-goods made by himself(224d11-e3). The sophist subsequently shows up in three moredivisions, in terms of 1. the art of contesting or disputing (agōnis-tikē [225a-226a]), 2. the art of discriminating or distinguishing(diakritikē [226c-231b]), and 3. the art of image-making (eikastikē

and deficiencies of diairesis in Statesman are possibly correctible byappeal to and reliance on paradeigmata, “examples.” Cf. Benardete,“Eidos and Diaeresis,” 194 ff.

4. Cf. the schematic presentation in Fig. 1 above.


[235b ff.]), and he is accordingly given three more definitions,none of which encloses him fully.

From the outset, the Stranger and Theaetetus are in search ofthe sophist, though they don’t even know what kind of being he is.It turns out, of course, that he is many kinds—but this they onlycome to learn during their search. At the very beginning (218b8ff.) they had the sophist in name only—that is, he was contentless.This would suggest that the “what” of the sophist is the product ofthe method used in pursuing him. Is it possible that what he is isgenerated by the Stranger’s procedure?5 Thus at 221c4-5 theStranger is fully confident that the very same procedure used indefining the angler is applicable to the pursuit of the sophist aswell.6 But how can he be so sure of this in advance—unless heholds the grand belief that his method is an absolutely comprehen-sive and universal one, applicable to, and yet completely independ-ent of, every possible subject matter?

Such a claim is a rather extraordinary one. It is also a claim towhich we are all too easily drawn. The immediate attraction it holdsfor us is natural enough, for it is a claim that appears to us to rescueus from our own finitude—a claim that holds out to us the promiseof omniscience. Everything is knowable; we have only to takewhatever happens to come along and plug it into our “method,”our “operation,” our “machine.” To possess this method is to pos-sess a magical shortcut that relieves us of the tiresome task of hav-ing to make judgments, in each instance, about what mode ofinvestigation is most suitable to the object in question. It is the de-nial that differences among objects matter at all; and it is, correla-tively, the claim that knowledge is utterly uniform, that all thingswhatsoever are knowable in exactly the same way. It is a magicalshortcut that allows us to forget such troublesome questions and

5. See Philebus 16d1 ff. Socrates begins his account of diairesis by say-ing: “aei mian idean peri pantos hekastotē themenous zētein—heurē-sein gar enousan” (“we must always suppose that there is foreverything one idea and must look for it—for we will find it”). Whatguarantees its being there? Does the procedure itself guarantee this?

6. See Benardete’s account of this in “Plato Sophist 223bl-7,” passim.


gives us a certain command over anything and everything—a sortof technologization of knowledge. It appeals to a certain hubriswithin us. In a rather different context of speaking, it might be saidthat it is the temptation to sin—that it appeals to a lust of the spirit,a lust for knowledge which is at once a lust for power.

To the extent, then, that diairesis is being put forward as sucha claim to universal method, its presentation in the dialogues couldbe viewed as an attempt to exhibit the defects of any such preten-sion to a “method” that is independent of, and yet applicable to,every possible subject matter. This would go some distance towardexplaining why our attention is being continually drawn to waysin which the diairesis fails.

But this is only one side of the story. It has to be true to saythat it is the Stranger’s procedure that generates the “what” of thesophist, for the particular classes he shows up in—the particulardesignations he takes on—are the results of the ways in which theStranger carries out the divisions. But this can’t be the whole truth,because the sophist is continually collapsing the class-distinctionsthey make, and he is constantly defying their attempt to enclosehim in a single horismos. So, in some important sense, what thesophist is, is independent of their activity upon him. From this pointof view it could still be said that the procedure produces the “what,”but only in the sense that, as a result of it, the sophist now for thefirst time explicitly acquires determinations he has always had im-plicitly. Correlatively, it would mean that we are now for the firsttime making explicit, as a series of articulate determinations of theobject, our own pre-thematic familiarity with that object. And thispre-thematic familiarity is something we must have—else we couldnever have made this an object of our interest and investigation inthe first place. If we continue to think in this direction, we mightbe inclined to revise somewhat our view of what diairesis is sup-posed to accomplish: Perhaps it’s not (or not completely) the grandpretension to a universal method that generates its own objects, butrather a procedure of explication that articulates explicitly what wealready—however dimly—“know.” It might be called a procedureof “unfolding”—an explicit unfolding of what we already “know”about the object in a quite pre-thematic way.


This view of diairesis is supported by a further consideration:The first division in the Sophist begins with the entire class of art(technē [219a]). The first division in the Statesman starts one stephigher than that, namely, with the entire class of knowledge (epis-temē [258e]). Why, in each case, does the dividing begin justhere? That is, what determines the initial comprehensive classfrom which the dividing will take its start—unless it is that wealready know in some sense the object of our search, and unlessthis object itself guides the division which is supposed to discoverit? Why, in the pursuit of the sophist, is the sophist placed at theoutset into the limited—albeit large—class of technē—unless thiswere so? If diairesis were to be genuinely a process of discovery,wouldn’t it be necessary for it to begin, not with technē, but withthe most comprehensive class—“the All” (to pan) or “Being” (toon)? But, after all, no diairesis begins in that way; it is in factdoubtful that from such a beginning any dividing could everbegin.7 How could one begin to divide to on or to pan? But evenif it could be done, the very first step one would take from thatbeginning would surely betray the guidance given already be-forehand by the object sought.

Does diairesis, understood in this way, give us the “what is”of the sophist? Certainly not in the sense of acquiring for ussomething we didn’t have before. Here the procedure called “di-vision” does not produce the “what is”; rather it is thoroughlyguided and directed, both at the very outset and at every singlestep of the way, by a knowledge of the “what is” that we alreadydo—and must—possess. But then the activity of dividing untilone reaches a “definition” can no longer have any significanceas a more or less technical “method” of inquiry designed to giveus new information, to make us knowers where we were notknowers before. But isn’t this why we always held definition insuch high regard?

7. On the impossibility of doing this, see Klein, “On Precision,” 297-298. Aristotle gives the reason in Posterior Analytics II, 92b14: “ou gargenos to on” (“for being is not a genus.”) Helpful on this point is MartinHeidegger, Sein und Zeit (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1963), 3.


There is something more. At 241b9-c4 the Stranger andTheaetetus are wondering why they’re having such difficulty cap-turing their quarry and are now facing up to the possibility thatthe “what” of the sophist might be infinite (aperantōn [241c1]).If the sophist is infinite, then he is indifferently anything. But thisis at odds with how the activity of dividing operates upon him:the diairesis cannot help but articulate him into specific, de-lim-ited classes; the determinations he takes on are de-limitations,de-finitions. In other words, the division is imposing limits on abeing whose own nature is to be unlimited. This explains whythe Stranger and Theaetetus are baffled at 241b9-c4: whateverthey say about the sophist can never be wholly false, and yet itmust always fail to enclose him completely. So the “what is” ofsomething and the procedure that is supposed to reveal it lookincommensurate. And wouldn’t this be the case with any objectone sets out to define? That is, any such object first comes tosight as some unity—though with certain determinations, a cer-tain number of them. But to speak of the object in terms of justone or another of these determinations—as diairesis does—limitsthe object to just that—delimiting it from those other determina-tions. It also fails to tell us precisely how the various determina-tions are related to one another in the object—and really relatedin the very being of the object itself, rather than related by ourlogical scheme. Even an exhaustive list of these determinations,by the way, does the very same thing: it must remain forevermerely a list, merely a piecemeal representation of what firstcame to sight as a unitary “what.”

So here we seem to be left with the possibility that even ifdiairesis were a means of articulation, guided beforehand by theobject sought, even then it would always be essentially defective;for its piecemeal, limited result would always be disproportionatewith its object.

Can we not, then, rehabilitate diairesis? We can, but only bymoving away from the view that it is intended to be a formal tech-nique which must be learned and practiced according to a set ofrules, a formal technique (not unlike a logical organon) that weought to employ in order to actually acquire knowledge. Indeed


such “rules”—the “prescriptions” given in the dialogues and byAristotle—look inexact, spurious, unlearnable, impossible to fol-low with any sort of precision. Could this be why our attentionis being constantly drawn to arbitrary moves, to gaps, break-downs and failures in the actual practice of diairesis? That thedialogues lead us in this way, then, could very well mean thatthey are actually attempting to warn us, to show us that if diaire-sis is understood to be such a formal technique that is both learn-able and teachable, that in and of itself transforms us intoknowers, then it is fools’ gold.

What, then, is diairesis? Here it seems to me that, of the fouraccounts provided by the dialogues, that given at Phaedrus 265d-266 b is the most helpful.8 Socrates speaks there of a pair of ac-tivities, “bringing together” and “dividing” (sunagōgē anddiairesis [266b5]), characterized in the following way: 1. “Bring-ing a scattered many into a single idea, seeing it all together [ital-ics mine], that, defining, one might make clear each thing hewishes to teach about” (eis mian te idean sunorōnta agein ta pol-lachē diesparmena, hin hekaston horizomenos dēlon poiēi, perihou anaei didaskein ethelēi); 2. “Dividing [these ‘ones’] onceagain, according to eidē, according to natural joints” (to palinkat’ eidē dunasthai temnein, kat’ arthra [265el-2]).

What, then, are these two related procedures? There is a pas-sage in Book VII of the Republic which, I believe, suggests ananswer to this question:

In the context of a discussion of that higher education whichwould produce philosopher-kings, calculation (logistikē, logis-

8. To center on the Phaedrus as the key account depends, of course, onthe interpretation that follows. It is not a position taken by all commen-tators. I have no quarrel with those whose particular interests lead themto emphasize one of the other accounts. A.C. Lloyd, for instance, in“Plato’s Description of Division”, centers on the Philebus because hethinks he can explain, by appealing to the geometrical practice of di-viding a continuous line, why the account in the Philebus is given interms of the opposition between the One and the Infinite. I would onlyquarrel with those who view diairesis as a bona fide logical-zeteticorganon along the lines indicated above.


mos) —that art which ostensibly operates on number—is intro-duced as something that leads directly to intellection and—sinceit would be the art of “turning the soul around” (psuchēs pe-riagōgē [521c6])—as something that prepares one for philoso-phy. But calculation is said not to appear at first as an “art” at all,but rather as a “trivial” or “lowly” thing (phaulon [522c4]) thatsimply distinguishes the “one” and the “two” (522c5 and 524b5).More particularly it is said that calculation is originally “sum-moned” (parakalein), called into operation, along with noēsisand dianoia, by the presence of contradictory sensations (524a-b). This explains why calculation is called something “trivial” or“lowly”: it is the original, most rudimentary, appearance ofhuman thinking. In other words, what shows up at a higher levelas an “art” is really present already as a most rudimentary featureof human thought, viz., the activity of bringing together, com-paring and distinguishing. Calculation brings together and dis-tinguishes, brings together and separates; the logistical “arts” ofaddition and subtraction are higher-level expressions of these ut-terly natural activities of thought and have their origins in them.9

I would I suggest, then, that the two related “procedures” ofsunagōgē and diairesis are originarily “summoned” in just thesame way, and that the presentation of them in the Phaedrus isessentially and primarily an account of this originary summoning.Sunagōgē and diairesis are, I suggest, the account of what we infact do—what thinking does—in thematizing something, in iso-lating it and making it thematic. That is, these “procedures” aresimply ways of talking about what we’ve already done—whatour understanding does—automatically, simply by nature, to getits bearings, namely, 1. recognize the “sameness” of a many, and2. recognize the differences inherent in that sameness. The firstmoment is a “seeing all together”(the word is sunorōnta)—that

9. This relationship between theoretical acts and conceptual objects, onthe one hand, and certain features of pre-theoretical, pre-conceptual ex-perience, on the other hand, has been studied and worked out exten-sively by Edmund Husserl. See especially his Erfahrung und Urteil(Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1972) and Formale und Transzenden-tale Logik (Halle: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1929).


is, the recognizing of a single “looks” (idea); the second momentis a “dividing according to eidē, according to the ‘naturaljoints’”—that is, the recognizing of essential differences withinthat single “looks.” The first moment is said to “bring a manyinto a one”, to “see it all together”, to “make it clear”, to “define”it. Here the “defining” has to mean “de-fining” it from other suchsingle “looks.” It de-fines it, isolates it, constitutes it as a singledeterminate “whole.” The second moment differentiates this sin-gle whole internally. The sunagōge is probably not simply re-versed in the diairesis. The differences ignored or sublated inbringing together the many into a one are probably not those “nat-ural joints” at which the diairetic divisions are subsequentlymade—which would mean that the two activities do not corre-spond exactly. That is, the sunagōge might very well be under-stood to bring the infinitely many particulars into a unitary whole;but the diairesis must be understood as the differentiation of thisunitary whole into finite eidetic parts. At Phaedrus 238a3 ff., forinstance, it is said of hubris that it is “many-membered and many-sorted” (polumeles kai polueides), and that the name of any par-ticular hubris is taken from whatever (sub-)idea predominates.And wouldn’t this also be true, for example, of virtue as a whole?

The horismos, then, must be understood as a “de-fining,” a“de-limiting,” an isolating. In the mere recognition of what is tobe defined, moreover, the thing is already isolated. Thus the ex-plicit activity of defining simply duplicates our initial recogni-tion; it doesn’t essentially add anything, but only shows us whatwe’ve already done in recognizing the thing. The explicit activityof defining does not, in any essential way, give us a “what is” asan answer that we didn’t have before; it only makes our pre-the-matic familiarity with the thing for the first time explicit for us.Furthermore, insofar as a definition only de-limits, it only isolatessomething from other things. And that means: it does not tell uswhat the thing is “by itself” (kath’auto), in its own innerness—but isn’t that precisely what the “what is” question asks for?10

10. As Sophist 248-255 shows, the “what is” of any being is, of course,both kath’ auto and pros heteron at the same time, and is perhaps both


In still another way “definition” shows itself to fall short ofgiving us the “what is” of what is being defined. At Statesman267c the Stranger states the result of the first division: States-manship is said to be the “art of herding human beings” (an-thrōponomikē [cf. 266e]). This definition might be said to be afine example of further dividing a genus by the addition of a spe-cific difference: here the genus would be nomeutikē—the art ofherding; and the specific difference would be anthrōpōn—of hu-mans specifically. But—apart from the word—is there really suchan art? This “art” has come about (or has been conjured up) sim-ply by combining the two words anthrōpos and nomeutikē—aneasy enough task. But we shouldn’t be fooled by the word. Tomake verbal “wholes” by just putting words together does not af-fect by one jot whether or not there are such wholes really. Actualwholes cannot be generated by simply combining words to formverbal “wholes.”

The flip-side of this problem would be the problem ofwhether, and to what extent, it is possible to reflect accurately inan account of a whole, the “wholeness” of that whole. This prob-lem is mentioned very briefly by Aristotle in Metaphysics Z(1037b12-14; 25-28). Some being (a “this,” a tode ti ) first ap-pears to us as a unity, a whole, and yet its formulation in speechhas parts. The difficulty then is to determine whether the formu-lational parts correspond to the real parts in the being itself. WhileAristotle seems to treat this matter merely aporetically, and thusto leave it an open question, the rhetoric of the passage suggestsotherwise.

The “what is” question, as it comes up in the dialogues, al-ways asks about wholes such as virtue, knowledge, and so forth.And at first glance it may look as though definition in terms ofgenus and specific difference solves the problem of grasping awhole. But it does not reflect the “wholeness” of a whole, for itonly adds the specific difference to the genus. That is, it mightlook like an attempt to integrate the comprehensive character of

inseparably, even in thought; it does seem a formidable difficulty toisolate the kath’auto aspect in speech.


the genus with its precise manifestation (namely, the specific dif-ference). But the relation of Part to Whole is not one of addition.Aristotle’s understanding of definition in terms of genus-plus-specific difference (Posterior Analytics B 96b27-97b13) exhibitsunambiguously its roots in diairesis. And even if we were to con-strue this in a somewhat softer way as an articulation or explica-tion rather than an addition in the literal sense, there would stillremain the problem of exactly how this articulation is related tothe unity, the wholeness, of what is being defined. Definition interms of genus plus specific difference does not adequately ad-dress this problem of how to reflect the wholeness of a whole inspeech (and perhaps in thought as well); it does, however, revealthis problem to us in a quite vivid way.

Throughout the Posterior Analytics, Aristotle’s treatment ofhorismos is always addressed to particulars: 1. to events and at-tributes (92a33-96a19); and 2. to beings (96a24 ff.). And to focuson these as the primary objects of definition accords with com-mon sense: we encounter something for the first time and, be-cause we don’t have a precise understanding of it, we ask what itis. But to define such a particular would be simply to specify theclass to which it belongs—and this must already presuppose ourunderstanding of those class-concepts. This would not, in anycase, give us the “what is” of that particular, not in the sense ofgiving us that precise understanding that we didn’t previouslyhave. If we begin by asking it what it is, and then go on to defineit in the way I’ve just described, we have not answered the “whatis” question, but have simply pushed the question back a step;for, in referring it to a certain class, we’d then have to pose thevery same question to that class-concept.

But what about these class-concepts themselves, as eideticwholes? Couldn’t we just as easily give definitions of these?These are, after all, the “whatnesses” of things—and so thethought of defining them might seem to hold out the promise offinally being able to unify definition and the “what is” question.But what would such a definition look like? Wouldn’t it too haveto refer this eidetic whole to yet others? The definition of eidē


then, would seem to presuppose yet other eidē as “tools” or “prin-ciples” in the procedure of defining. And this means that, throughdefinition alone, we’d never get the “what is”—not even of theseeidetic wholes.

At the end of the Posterior Analytics, Aristotle addresseshimself to the question of how we know first principles (archaior prōtai archai), and he shows that knowledge of these comes,not through definition or demonstration, but only—and in anoriginary way—through intellection (nous). The reason, ofcourse, is that both demonstration and definition have to startsomewhere, need starting points (archai). Or, stated otherwise,all discursive, dianoetic activity of thought presupposes and restson nous, on an original noēsis, since thinking discourses fromsomething and about something. At 93b23 he had established thatthe “ what is”—the ti esti—is itself an archē; and at 92b37-40he had established that knowledge of the “what is” cannot be ac-quired through definition. In other words, to define something isnot to answer the “what is” question; rather, the “what is” mustitself be presupposed as an archē by any act of defining. The abil-ity to define as such presupposes these whatnesses, these eideticwholes, as its archai—its starting points or first principles.

There is something further. To have defined is to have de-lim-ited and enclosed something in such a way that it is now presentedto us in marked relief. What we are presented with as the result ofdefinition is what, from the point of view of a “properly” executedprocess of division, came to be called the infima species, or, touse a more Greek expression, the atomic eidos, the “indivisiblelooks.” This would be the horismos, the definition, the enclosurebrought to its tightest possible state. Would this be the ti esti, the“what is”? No. But it would be that of which we could now forthe first time ask this question: What is its “what is”?

This requires some elaboration: Definition does indeed giveus the “what is,” but not in the sense we had anticipated: to arrive,through definition, at to ti esti—the “what is”—is to arrive, notat an answer, but at a question. The substantivized form of thatquestion—to ti esti—should not for an instant lead us to think


that it has ceased to be a question: to treat the “what is” as a sub-stantive—to ti esti11—means that the question as a question isbeing substantivized. The implication of this is far-reaching, forit means that the “what is” of something is a question, is a prob-lem; and therefore to know the “what is” of something—to knowan eidetic whole—is to know aporetically, to be in possession,not of an answer, but of a problem.

The result of definition is the ti esti—not as an answer, butas a question. More forcefully stated: The “what is” question, asa question, is what stands at the end of the entire activity of defin-ing. It is the proper telos of definition. The ti esti is the archē ofdefinition in the most profound sense: it is the archē-archōn; itstands at the beginning of definition as its necessary starting-point; it shows up as the end-result of definition; and it rules overand guides the activity of defining throughout, from beginningto end. This means that to have defined something is not itself anend, is not to have reached one’s natural goal. To have defined isto be brought face to face with the “what is” question and, assuch, has been barely a start. Rather than being an end, definitionis merely the condition for a new and quite different beginning:To define is to provide oneself with the possibility of philosophy.

11. Cf. inter alia Posterior Analytics II, 92a35, 92b39.


The Stranger as a Socratic Philosopher:The Socratic Nature of the Stranger’sInvestigation of the Sophist1

Corinne Painter

Much of the secondary literature on Plato’s Sophist considers theStranger to be a non-Socratic philosopher, and regards his appear-ance in the dialogues as a sign that Plato had moved on from hisfascination with Socrates to develop a more “mature” way of phi-losophizing.2 This essay will argue, on the contrary, that the in-vestigation led by the Stranger in the Sophist demonstrates anessentially Socratic philosophical stance. In order to do this, I willconsider carefully some dramatic evidence in the Sophist that al-lows us to notice a philosophical “transformation” in the Stranger.My consideration focuses upon the Stranger’s rejection of the Par-menidean way of philosophizing followed by his acceptance of theSocratic way of practicing philosophy. This is revealed most deci-sively by the Stranger’s willingness to pursue truth and justice atthe expense of overturning the practices of his philosophical train-ing, and, secondarily, by his genuine concern with showing thatSocrates is not guilty of sophistry.

1. I would like to thank Joe Sachs for his generous communications withme about Plato’s Sophist and other Platonic works. His insights haveadded greatly to my interpretation and understanding of Plato’s thought.2. There are far too many accounts to list here; but see, for example, Stan-ley Rosen, Plato’s Sophist: The Drama of the Original and Image (SouthBend, Indiana: St. Augustine’s Press, 1999). Just as Rosen argues in histext, most of the accounts in the literature that treat this issue view theStranger as non-Socratic and advance the position that he represents atleast a change, or perhaps even a progression, in Plato’s thinking awayfrom, for instance, emphasis on the Socratic elenchus, to a more devel-oped, mature philosophical practice that emphasizes dialectic.

Corinne Painter is a Professor in the Humanities Department at Washte-naw Community College, in Ann Arbor, Michigan.

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Surprisingly, although there has been almost no discussionin the literature about the Stranger’s philosophical developmentin the course of his examination of the Sophist, it is neither dif-ficult to notice nor unimportant to acknowledge the Stranger’sphilosophical “movement” away from Parmenides’s way of phi-losophy towards a different way. Indeed, on several occasions,the Stranger doffs his Parmenidean cloak and dons Socratic cloth-ing, a transformation that converts him into a “true” philosopher,understood as one who attempts to make images in speech of thatwhich is authentically compelling—that is, the good—which istherefore of ethical significance.

It is not incidental to the dialogue that Socrates instigates thediscussion by asking the Stranger to “do the favor” (217c) of ac-counting for the sophist, nor that the Stranger agrees only atSocrates’s request, after having previously turned down a similarrequest made by Theodorus. This shows that the Stranger is moreconcerned with satisfying Socrates’s desire to account for thesophist than Theodorus’s. And this suggests, in turn, that somethingabout Socrates’s request is more compelling than Theodorus’s.What is urgent about Socrates’s request would seem to be his pres-ent circumstance, namely, his having been accused of crimesagainst the polis that include practicing sophistry. Socrates’s ownlife situation gives rise to his concern to account properly forsophistry and distinguish it from philosophy; it is almost certainthat this personal involvement confers on his request an urgencythat simply is not present in Theodorus’s merely theoretical inter-est. Importantly, the urgency is an ethical one, inasmuch as it isone that is “related to what truly and ultimately matters,”3 whichin this case arises from Socrates’s “specific human predicament.”4

Since Parmenides’s “style” of philosophizing “requires a stud-


3. Adriaan Peperzak, System and History in Philosophy: On the Unity ofThought and Time, Text and Explanation, Solitude and Dialogue, Rhetoricand Truth in the Practice of Philosophy and its History, (New York: StateUniversity of New York Press, 1986), 13.4. Drew Hyland, Finitude and Transcendence in the Platonic Dialogues(New York: State University of New York Press, 1995), 176.

ied indifference to its topics,”5 there are hints to be found as earlyas the dialogue’s beginning that the Stranger might be willing toreject his Parmenidean training in order to do the favor of account-ing properly for the sophist. Indeed, if we believe that “indifferenceseems to be the only reaction one cannot have to a philosophicquestion, if one is aware of it at all,”6 then the Stranger’s willing-ness to undergo the difficult and complicated investigation of thesophist only at Socrates’s request indicates that he takes Socrates’squestion to be one that is asked philosophically. For, becauseSocrates’s question originates in a desire to know about somethingthat is at stake in his life, it therefore deserves serious and sustainedphilosophical attention and energy.

Nevertheless, the Stranger does not begin his investigation asSocrates usually does, namely, with an elenchus. This is probablywhy very few scholars see a close connection between the Stranger’sway of philosophizing and Socrates’s way. Except for the emphasisthat the Stranger places on agreement among the interlocutors—which mirrors Socrates’s insistence on mutual agreement in thecourse of dialectical investigations—he initially conducts his in-vestigation after the fashion of his philosophical father, Par-menides, who claims, in marked contrast to Socrates, that the“philosophic discipline requires purging ourselves of any motiveto care about any one thing more than another.”7 Before he gets tohis sixth attempt to account for the sophist, the Stranger tries totrack the sophist by employing the method of division by kinds,according to which a given hunting ground must be cut always intotwo and only two opposing divisions, until, at last, a long and log-ically descriptive title of the intended prey results. Prior to his sixthdivision, then, the Stranger proceeds as Parmenides taught him: byproposing further and further opposing, and thus exhaustive, divi-sions that allow him eventually to uncover the sophist in as manydifferent guises as there are different starting points. As the

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5. Joe Sachs, “What is a What-is Question?” The St. John’s Review 44.1(1993): 46.6. Ibid.7. Ibid., 43.

Stranger explicitly states, in practicing this logical method there isno room for caring any more or less for the divisions that are made,since the method “honors all equally” (227b2), nor is there roomfor evaluating the divisions in any “extra-logical sense”—for in-stance, by an appeal to one’s sense of justice or honor. For, as longas the divisions are made properly—exhaustively and beginningfrom appropriate starting points—the accounts ultimately obtainedwill be logically infallible.

With his sixth attempt at finding the sophist, however, theStranger employs the method of division in a significantly modi-fied manner, namely, by no longer insisting on pure logic that doesnot “care” for its results and does not “trust” the desire to do justiceto the matter under examination. The point of departure for thesixth division is peculiar in that it begins with what might be calledan “unauthorized division” of expertise into a third subclass, whichgoes beyond the authorized two divisions of division by kinds.Since the sixth account of the sophist is spurred by the Stranger’sassessment that the first five accounts failed to capture adequatelythe sophist’s essence, and since it is impossible to judge the differ-ing accounts critically on the basis of logic alone, the Stranger’sunauthorized beginning seems to be grounded in his extra-logicalsense that, even though the various accounts hold up to logicalscrutiny, they fail to do true justice to the sophist’s complex nature.This indicates that the Stranger genuinely cares about keeping thephilosopher and the sophist distinct; for “someone who does notcare about the thing in question cannot see the point of suspendinghis prejudices.”8 In this case, the prejudices that need to be sus-pended are the Stranger’s initial commitment to proceed purelylogically, without any special concern for his divisions, and hisParmenidean philosophical training.

The Stranger’s decision to go against the rule of his ownmethod arises from two causes. First, his efforts so far have madehim think that the sophist is so complex and slippery a characterthat he evaded the first five attempts to capture him—a judgment,as we can see, that can be attained only after appealing to an extra-logical standard. Second, he genuinely desires to understand how


8. Sachs, 46.

the philosopher can be misperceived as a sophist, and thus, morespecifically, how it is possible for Socrates to be falsely accusedof being a sophist. Once the Stranger sees that the first five guisesof the sophist do not present engaging images of the philosopher,and consequently, that they do not address the possibility of con-fusing the sophist and the philosopher, he is compelled to divideexpertise into an unorthodox third part, so that he can construct anaccount that may be sufficient to deal with the apparent proximitybetween philosopher and sophist. Put very simply, insofar as thedivision of expertise introduced in the sixth account of sophistry,namely, soul-cleansing refutation (230d-e),9 turns out to be an ac-count of what Socrates does, it provides the necessary link betweenSocrates and sophistry that accounts for his being falsely accusedof sophistry. In this way, it provides the Stranger with the oppor-tunity to scrutinize the proposed association between Socrates andsophistry that seems to be responsible for driving the discussion.

It is at this point in the dialogue that the Stranger gives a crit-ical evaluation of the sixth account that goes beyond revealing hismotivations and intentions, and tells us about the role he plays inthe dialogue. As the three translators of a fine edition of the Sophistsay in the introduction to their translation, the sixth account “curi-ously reveals the sophist as a cross-examiner of empty sham wis-dom and therefore as entangled with the philosophic nature.Sophist and philosopher appear to be interwoven.”10 This, I think,compels us to think of Socrates rather than of a sophist, especiallysince the Stranger says “he’s afraid to say” that the men he’s de-scribed in this way are “sophists” since he does not want “to conferon them too great an honor” (231a1-3). So I believe, unlike many,perhaps even most, scholarly commentators, including Rosen, thatthe Stranger’s critical assessment of the sixth account points ulti-mately to his likely desire to want to defend Socrates from the


9. The sixth account of the sophist, like all the others, contains much moredetail than needs to be addressed here. For a helpful discussion see:Corinne Painter, “In Defense of Socrates,” Epoche 9.2 (2005): 317-333.10. Plato’s Sophist: The Professor of Wisdom, translated, with introduc-tion and glossary, by Eva Brann, Peter Kalkavage, and Eric Salem (New-buryport, MA: Focus Publishing, 1996), 10.

charges of sophistry that have been brought against him. I admitthat this remark only explicitly states that the sixth account doesnot accurately describe sophists because the activity it elucidatesis too honorable to be one in which sophists engage. But at thesame time, it at least implicitly points us in the direction ofSocrates, since the activity it describes is characteristic of him.

Hence, the Stranger’s implicit association of Socrates with anhonorable activity, together with his willingness to investigate thesophist only at Socrates’s request appear to point in the directionof a desire to defend Socrates against the charges leveled at him.If we add to this the Stranger’s agreement with Socrates that thephilosopher often appears to be something he is not, including asophist (216c4-d5), the inference is even stronger. Moreover, if thecontrary motive were to be put forth—that the Stranger reallywants to prosecute Socrates on behalf of the youth of Athens,whom he supposedly corrupted—this motive too would reflect aconcern with a matter of great political and ethical import. Thus,even in this case, the Stranger turns out to be a philosopher in thefollowing Socratic sense: he understands his philosophical inquiryinto the nature of the sophist to be intimately bound up with a mat-ter of practical, ethical significance.

This conviction can be reinforced in several ways. First, theStranger eventually rejects his earlier claim that the interlocutorsare not allowed to pass judgment on their accounts by assessingany of the arts they describe as more honorable or worthy than anyothers (227a10-b8). The evidence for this is his willingness to goagainst this “rule” of his own method and his related willingnessto discard the wholly “neutral,” Parmenidean attitude. For whenhe admits his distaste for describing the sophist as one who engagesin soul-cleansing refutation (231a1-3), the Stranger gives up hiscommitment to honor the generals’ art of hunting and the art oflouse-catching equally (227b8-11). In this way, he abandons hisParmenidean neutrality and recognizes that he will have to take anew path: if he is to keep sophistry and philosophy distinct, hemust let his genuine, ethical concern over the sixth account of thesophist guide the rest of his investigation. Indeed, at this point inthe discussion the Stranger realizes that his “technical” procedure


for hunting down the sophist will not allow him to fulfill his prom-ise of accounting for the sophist in such a way that the philosophercan no longer be mistaken for him, and the Stranger’s expressionof dismay at having discovered five different accounts of thesophist shows this:

[I]sn’t it clear that when a person experiences this withrespect to some expertise, he’s not able to see what allthese studies have in view—and that’s why he callstheir possessor by many names instead of one? . . . Solet us avoid experiencing this in our own search be-cause of laziness (232a1-b2).

Accordingly, we have reason to believe that the Stranger no longertrusts his initially preferred method of division by kinds to com-plete the investigation. Moreover, this strengthens the impressionthat he is prepared to proceed differently, which, again, suggeststhat he genuinely cares about the matter at issue—namely, keepingthe philosopher and the sophist distinct.

In fact, the Stranger seems to care so much about distinguish-ing the philosopher and the sophist that he is willing to suspend allof his “safe opinions,” all of his “previous prejudices,”11 in orderto do the favor that he promised. Indeed, the Stranger’s worry, par-ticularly over the sixth definition, indicates his recognition that di-vision by kinds, although it may be well suited to mapping outrelationships of subordination between genera and species, is notwell suited for the task of distinguishing the sophist from thephilosopher. In acknowledging that this task cannot be completedon the basis of division by kinds alone, the Stranger lets his “out-rage . . . as a human being”12 compel him to conduct the remainderof his search for the sophist in another way. This new way, whilestill rigorous and careful, seems to the Stranger to be more com-patible with the important political and ethical nature of the task,and at the same time, it allows him to “trust his own desire to dojustice.”13 In allowing the investigation to follow another path, as


11. Sachs, 46.12. Ibid.13. Ibid.

Joe Sachs claims, the Stranger abandons the safe and familiar Par-menidean philosophizing, with its indifferent, dispassionate, andentirely logical modus operandi,14 and “crosses over from the safedomain of logic to something called philosophy.”15

Later in the dialogue, the Stranger even makes an explicitlycritical remark about the technique of division by kinds that is quitescornful: “to attempt to separate off everything from everything isin other respects discordant, and what’s more, it belongs to a manwho is altogether unmusical and unphilosophical” (259d8-e1, em-phasis mine). If we add to this his claim that the one who knowshow to practice the art of division and collection properly is theone “who philosophizes purely and justly” (253e4-5, emphasesmine), as well as his rather Socratic words of encouragement toTheaetetus, asking him, for example, to be brave and not to loseheart (261b5-6), it is quite clear that the Stranger now comportshimself Socratically. All in all, this not only strengthens the notionthat the Stranger’s motivation in the Sophist is more likely con-nected to a desire to defend Socrates than to a desire to prosecutehim, but it also suggests that he has become “like”—perhaps evena good image of—a Socratic philosopher.

Finally, there is yet another way in which the Stranger showsthe mark of a Socratic—which is to say, genuine—philosopher,namely, his eagerness not to assume that he knows what he doesnot know. Indeed, the Stranger seems to appreciate very well thatwhile all of his accounts of the sophist, including the seventh andfinal one, capture some significant aspects of the sophist’s decep-tive nature, none of them can say the final word about this slipperycreature (268d5). Like Socrates, the Stranger is very careful not toconflate the images he makes in speech with the originals to whichthey point. In other words, the Stranger’s humble acknowledgmentthat his logos about the sophist necessarily points beyond itself to-wards an eidos that it cannot articulate adequately seems to mirrorSocrates’s repeated admonitions that all our words are at once boththemselves and not themselves, insofar as they always point be-


14. Sachs, 41.15. Sachs, 43.

yond themselves to the eide, that is, to the invisible looks that makethem intelligible.

In sum, the investigation led by the Stranger in the Sophistdemonstrates a specifically Socratic philosophical character, andin the course of attempting to define the sophist, the Stranger showsthat Socrates is not guilty of sophistry. The philosophical conver-sion undergone by the Stranger—from Parmenides’s way of phi-losophizing to Socrates’s way—indicates that he recognizes thesuperiority of “extra-logical” philosophizing that is rooted in asense of ethics. This is revealed by the Stranger’s admission thatthe sixth definition of sophistry as “soul cleansing refutation” isdisturbing because it describes an activity that is too honorable tobe connected with sophistry. Since this definition was arrived atby a non-Parmenidean, Socratic way of philosophizing, it identifiesthe Socratic way with virtue, and defends Socrates against the dis-honorable charges associated with sophistry. In this way, theStranger vindicates Socrates while at the same time he becomesvery much “like” him.



The Concept of Measure and theCriterion of SustainabilityJohn D. Pappas

The classical concept of measure, which is akin to moderationand balance, has been specified arithmetically in architecture andthe arts. But in law, politics, the social sciences, and the behav-ioral sciences, measure is a fuzzy concept. A rational definitionof measure in human behavior would curb the impulsive humantendency to excess, and might thus hedge humanity against theeffects of hubris, which has historically led societies, states, andeven empires to disaster.

When people lose a sense of measure, they also lose touchwith reality. And because there is no settled definition of measurein practical matters, it is difficult for leaders and policymakers tosee limits begin transgressed in time to avert danger.

The purpose of this essay is to suggest that, in the absenceof a definition of measure, we may instead apply the criterion ofsustainability to detect hubristic aberrations from measure earlyenough to curb their ill effects.

1. The universal concept of measure

The concept of measure or mean was the cornerstone of classicalcivilization. Measure (metron in Greek1) is akin to the ConfucianMiddle Way (zhōng yōng) and the Buddhist Middle Path (majjhimāpaṭipadā). It pertains to aesthetic symmetry and functional harmonyin human interaction with the social and natural environment.

John D. Pappas is legal and economic adviser at AGM Law Firm. Hestudied law at Athens University and economics at Columbia University.

1. The English word measure derives from the Latin mensura, which inturn derives from verb metiri, which is related to the Greek word metron.This is the etymological root of meter, metro–, –metric, etc., and a compo-nent of symmetry and its derivatives (symmetric, asymmetry, and so on.)

In the arts and particularly in architecture, measure has beenexpressed in particular mathematical forms. For example, thegolden ratio, φ (=1.6180339…),2 which Euclid called extremeand mean ratio, is a well-known mathematical definition of geo-metric measure:

A straight line is said to have been cut in extremeand mean ratio when, as the whole line is to thegreater segment, so is the greater to the less. (Akronkai meson logon eutheia tetmēsthai legetai, hotanēi hōs hē holē pros to meizon tmēma, houtōs tomeizon pros to helatton.) (Euclid, Elements, Book6, Definition 3.)

Even before Euclid showed how to calculate the φ-ratio,Phidias (c. 480–430 BC) had created a diachronic manifestationof aesthetic measure in geometry and architecture by “curving”

75ESSAYS & LECTURES | PAPPAS

2. φ, the asymptotic limit of the Fibonacci sequence Fn+1 / Fn , “has inspiredthinkers of all disciplines like no other number in the history of mathemat-ics.” Mario Livio, The Golden Ratio: The Story of Phi, the World’s MostAstonishing Number (New York: Broadway Books, 2002), 6.

Fig.1: The Golden Section in the Facade of the Parthenon


that ratio into marble (Fig. 1).3 The Parthenon seems to be cir-cumscribed conceptually by a Fibonacci-type sequence of goldenrectangles: each rectangle has a length that is the product of itswidth and φ, while its width is the length of its predecessor rec-tangle. The aesthetic effect of the golden rectangle is summarizedby Joe Sachs in this way:

What are the right proportions for the entrance to a tem-ple? . . . The rectangle formed by the columns is widerthan it is high. How much wider? Enough so that it willnot look squashed together, but not so much that it wouldbecome stringy looking. Let your imagination squeezeand stretch it to see what goes wrong, and then noticethat to get it right again you have to bring it back to acertain very definite shape. This is the golden rectangle.It has been produced spontaneously by artists, architects,and carpenters of any and every time and place.4

But long before Phidias and Euclid, the concept of measurehad been a focal theme in ancient Greek civilization, as is shownby the frequent recurrence of that concept in Homer’s Odyssey(for instance, in Bk. 2, l. 230, Bk. 5, l. 9, Bk. 7, l. 310, Bk. 14, l.434, Bk. 15, l. 68, Bk. 17, l. 321, Bk. 21, l. 294, and Bk. 22, l.46)—although Homer uses the word aisima rather than metron.For example, in Bk. 7, l. 310, Alcinous addresses Odysseus withthe same phrase that Menelaus uses in Bk. 15, l. 71 when speak-ing to Telemachus: “measure is always optimal” (ameinō d’aisima panta).

In Homeric vocabulary, aisima is related to Aisa, the Greek

3. In 1909, the American mathematician Mark Barr gave the goldenratio the lower-case Greek letter phi (φ), the first letter in Phidias’sname, to honor the classical sculptor and architect. (Theodore AndreaCook, The Curves of Life [London: Constable, 1914; reprinted inNewYork: Dover Publications, 1979], 420). The capital letter Φ is often usedto symbolize the inverse of φ, i.e. Φ = 1 / φ = Ο.6180339. . . .4. Joe Sachs, “Measure, Moderation, and the Mean,” The St. John’s Re-view 46.2 (2002): 7. This article is available on the web here:http://www.sjc.edu/files/1713/9657/8097/sjc_review_vol46_no2.pdf


goddess who personifies human destiny. So Homer’s idea ofmeasure implicitly includes the notions of allotted share, portion,lot, or term of life, in accordance with the subject’s destiny—thatis, in line with his idiosyncrasies, social constraints, and naturallimits. Moreover, Homer was probably the first to try to describemeasure in human social interaction. In 15.68-74, he suggesteda subjectivist view of social measure by metaphorically depictingsocial relations among people as interactions between hosts andtheir guests:

Telemachus, I will not keep you here for long when youare eager to depart:I would even blame another man who,as host, is either too fond of his guest or too rude to him:measure is always optimal. Being too quick to send aguest on his way when he doesn’t want to leave is just asbad as holding him back when he wants to depart. Onemust treat a guest well as long as he is in the house andlet him go promptly when he wants to leave.

(Tēlemach’, ou ti s’ egō ge polun chronon enthad’ eruxōiemenon nostoio: nemessōmai de kai allōiandri xeinodokōi, hos k’ exocha men philee isin,exocha d’ echthaire isin· ameino d’ aisima panta.Ison toi kakon esth’, hos t’ ouk ehtelonta neesthaixeinon epotrunei kai hos essumenon katerukei.chrē xeinon paeonta philein, ethelonta de pempein.)

To a considerable degree, Homer’s masterpiece is a poeticaccount of four intertwined concepts: 1. human measure; 2.hubris, that is, extreme aberration away from measure, like theMassacre at Troy, or like Odysseus’s defiance of nature in theform of his defiance of the gods, or like the abusive behavior ofPenelope’s suitors during Odysseus’s absence; 3. atē, the goddessthat personifies mischief, delusion and folly, which are states ofmind that accelerate the decline of a hubristic subject; and 4.nemesis, the goddess that personifies justice and reinstitutes thebalance of social order.

Long before Homer, these concepts were symbolized in themyth of Icarus. Icarus attempted to escape Minoan Crete by fly-ing in the air on waxed and feathered wings, but he overrated hiscapabilities and underrated the forces of nature. He ignored the


advice of his father Daedalus to “fly the middle course” betweenthe foam of the sea and the heat of the sun, so that his wingswould neither be soaked nor burned. Icarus soared hubristicallyupward toward the sun, which soon melted the wax off his wings,so that he fell into the sea to his death.

But Homer was the true philosophical pioneer in regard tothe notion of measure. Through his poetic imagery, he laid out asolid philosophical base concerning the delicate relations be-tween measure, hubris, folly, and justice. This became the foun-dation for the elaborate work of the philosophers and thetragedians of the pre-classical and classical periods. For instance,Homer’s concept of measure was later picked up by Cleobulusof Rhodes (died ca. 560 BC), one of the Seven Sages of ancientGreece, in his most celebrated maxim “measure is best” (metronariston). And a later philosopher, Protagoras of Abdera (c. 490-420BC), understood measure in Homer’s subjectivist terms, as is shownby a quotation that appears in Plato’s Theaetetus (170d–e):

Man [is] the measure of all useful things.(Pantōn chrēmatōn metron anthrōpos.)

This statement was later quoted, almost ipsissima verba, bySextus Empiricus in his Adversus Mathematicos (7.60)]:

[Protagoras said that] man is the measure of all usefulthings, that is, in regard to things that exist, how they are,and in regard to things that do not exist, how they are not.([Protagoras eipe] pantōn chrēmatōn metron anthrōponeinai, tōn men ontōn hōs estin, tōn de ouk ontōn hōs oukestin.)

Protagoras’s statement is gender-neutral because he refersto human beings in general rather than men in particular (an-thrōpos means “human being” in Greek). Moreover the exactmeaning of the statement (which is as much utilitarian as it issubjectivist) has been lost in both English and Modern Greektranslations. In all translations I am aware of, chrēmatōn hasbeen erroneously translated as things (in English) or prag-matōn (in Modern Greek). As result, an overly anthropocentricsense has been imputed to Protagoras’s statement, as though it


meant “man is the measure of everything in the universe.” Butin ancient Greek, chrēmata did not signify everything in theuniverse, but only things needed or used by humans on earth:the noun is related to the verb chrēsthai, meaning “to need” or“to use.” As an example of the sense, Aristotle gives the fol-lowing definition in his Nichomachean Ethics (1119b26): “Bychrēmata we mean all things whose value is measured bymoney.” (Chrēmata legomen panta hosōn hē axia nomismatimetreitai.)

So in the Protagorean subjectivist context, measure is under-stood as a concept related to human attributes. But somewhat ear-lier, Heraclitus (ca. 535–475 BC) had proceeded a step further.He understood measure as a natural phenomenon, or even as thefoundational principle of the universe.

Heraclitus theorized that hubris5 entails inexorable divineretribution, which is personified by the remorseless goddessNemesis. The name of that goddess is related to the Greek verbnemein, meaning “to distribute appropriately,” which also givesus the Greek word nomos, meaning “custom” or “law” (as in thewords economy and astronomy). Infractions by mortals againstother mortals (that is, hubris) disturb the “naturally right” pro-portion that is due to them according to each one’s destiny ormoira. In this context, hubris is either a human activity or a nat-ural phenomenon that takes place beyond or without measure (as

5. The concept of hubris or hybris was introduced into academic liter-ature by Friedrich Nietzsche in his incomplete treatise Philosophy inthe Tragic Age of the Greeks (1873). He explicitly connects it with Her-aclitus. “That dangerous word hybris is indeed the touchstone for everyHeraclitan. Here he must show whether he has understood or failed torecognize his master.” (Friedrich Nietzsche, Philosophy in the TragicAge of the Greeks, trans. Mariann Cowan (Washington, D.C.: RegneryPublishing, 1962), 61. In English, the term hubris means excessivepride, or insolent self-confidence, or haughtiness. However few modernEnglish speakers are aware that authors of the Greek classical periodapply the term in a much more restrictive way. The popular Englishsaying “the sky is the limit” would seem quite hubristic to classicalGreek authors.


in hybrid, hybridize, hybridization). Such events thus diverge-from the primary or teleological course of nature; then vengefulNemesis intervenes as the just balancer who reinstitutes the nat-ural order. establishing a new state of equilibrium. Consequently,from a Heraclitian perspective of the world, nature tends towardbiodiverse harmony through a dynamic equilibrium process thathinders any single creature or species from growing to such anextent that it eventually crowds out all other creatures or speciesin nature.

[Heraclitus’s] unified, ordered world of balanced changeis also a world in which the “laws” or norms of justiceprevail. . . . “Justice [Nemesis] will catch up with fabri-cators of falsehoods and those who bear witness to them”(fragment 28b). More generally, such norms can be de-scribed as “divine law” in nature, a law that is “common”or universal in its accessibility and applicability: “thosewho [would] speak with insight must base themselvesfirmly on that which is common to all, as city does uponits law—and much more firmly! For all human laws arenourished by one [law], the divine [law]” fragment 114).But the justice that is cosmic law is the justice of disrup-tion and revolution, of war and violence, not that of balmand healing. “One must realize,” he says, “that war iscommon and justice strife, and that all things come to bethrough strife and are [so] ordained.” . . . [A]ll change,however violent, be it the macrochanges of nature andthe outer cosmos or war among states, or civic strife, orthe battles that rage in the human heart, can be seen asintegral parts of the law or [divine] “plan” that “steers allthings” producing, through change, that higher unitywhich is the cosmos.6

Such a cosmic perspective of measure is a recurring themein the Koran, where measure is presented as the prime attribute

6. T. M. Robinson, Heraclitus: Fragments, trans. and ed. T. M. Robin-son (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1987), 185. Note also thatin fragment 43 Heraclitus says, “there is a greater need to extinguishhybris than there is a blazing fire” (ibid., 33).

of God’s wisdom and omnipotence:7

HE to Whom belongs the Kingdom of the heavens andthe earth. And HE has taken unto Himself no son, andhas no partner in the Kingdom, and HE has createdeverything, and has ordained for it its proper measure(Al-Furqan, 25:3).

And Who sent down out of heaven water in measure; andWe revived thereby a land that was dead; even so youshall be brought forth (Az-Zukhruf, 43:11).

And whosoever puts his trust in God, He shall sufficehim. God attains his purpose. God has appointed a meas-ure for everything (At-Talaq, 65:3).

Obviously, the Koran’s reference to rainfall as a manifesta-tion of divine measure is in line with the diachronic Heraclitianconcept of cosmic measure: Rainfall may vary in space-time, asregards to intensity and duration, but is neither too much (to theextent that all life on earth is flooded off to total extinction) nortoo little (to the extent that no life on earth can be sustained).Nevertheless, local floods or droughts may occasionally “steerthings” in a local natural environment toward a new dynamic bal-ance of “that higher unity which is the cosmos.”

A historical example of the applicability of the Heraclitianperspective of measure is the attempt of Artabanus to avert thePersians from expanding their empire to Europe. Specifically, hegave the following strategic advice to Xerxes, who was preparingto invade Greece:8

Do you see how God does not allow the bigger animalsto become insolently visible, as it is them that He strikes


7. In the following translations, italics are mine. The first example isfrom The Holy Qur’an: Arabic Text and English Translation, ed. andtrans. Maulawi Sher Ali (Islamabad: Islam International, 2004), 412.The second and third examples are from A. J. Arberry, The Koran In-terpreted: A Translation (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1996), 199and 284.8. Herodotus, Histories, 7.10e.


with his lightning rather than the smaller ones that neverinsult Him? Do you also see how He throws his bolts al-ways against the tallest buildings and the tallest trees?Because God likes to draw back anything that stands out.Likewise even a mighty army may be discomfited by asmall army, whenever God in His wrath exposes the for-mer to fear[feelings of terror] or storm [natural disasters]through which they perish in a way unworthy of them.Because God allows no one to consider himself great,except Himself.(Horais ta huperechonta zōia hōs keraunoi ho theos oudeeai phantazesthai, ta de smikra ouden min knizei· horaisde hōs es oikēmata ta megista aiei kai dendrea ta toiautaaposkēptei ta belea· phileei gar ho theos ta huperechontapanta kolouein. houtō de kai stratos pollos hypo oligoudiaphtheiretai kata toionde· epean sphi ho theos ph-thonēsas phobon embalēi ē brontēn, di’ ōn ephtharēsananaxiōs heōutōn. ou gar eai phroneein mega ho theosallon ē heōuton.)

Xerxes made the devastating hubristic mistake of ignoringArtabanus’s Heraclitean advice, because he was under the spellof Atē. The typical pairing of hubris and nemesis, which appearsin many tragedies such as Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, Aeschylus’sAgamemnon, and Euripides’s Hippolytus, is almost always asso-ciated with the Homeric goddess Atē, as epitomized in Sopho-cles’s choral passage from Antigone, 621–625):

Evil seems good, sooner than later, to him whose mindGod leads on to [mischief under the control of] Atē. Andso he manages only for the briefest time without Atē.(To kakon dokein pot’ esthlontōid’ emmen hotōi phrenastheos agei pros atan.prassei d’ oligiston chronon ektos atas.)

In sum, Atē instills confusion in the mind of every subjectof hubristic behavior, and she thus personifies self-destructivesyndromes like defensive avoidance, overvigilance, reactivity,and denial. These are ruinous states of mind that have led many


economies, armies, states, and empires to disaster or even to col-lapse.

2. The Aristotelian mean

In light of the grave consequences of hubris, the critical importanceof defining measure comes to the fore. If measure is not definedconclusively, then humans may not be able to detect and avoid cat-astrophic hubristic aberrations from it. The future of every statewould then be precarious, because its leaders would be ignorantof, or confused about, effective and sustainable policies, which areconditional on measured behavior and balanced organization.

These considerations haunted Aristotle, who lived during thedecline of classical Greece and the rise of Macedonian hegemony.Plato, the teacher of Aristotle, had witnessed the collapse of Athen-ian democracy in the hubristic Peloponnesian war (431–404 BC).This war among Greek city-states demonstrated that, although theGreeks had prevailed militarily during the Persian invasions of490-479BC, the Persians prevailed culturally. During the Persianwars, the Greeks had been exposed to, and became well acquaintedwith, Asian materialistic values and hegemonic aspirations. To theextent that these values infected Greek society, they ultimately ru-ined most of Greece. To a great extent, the Persians made up fortheir losses on the battlefield by defeating Homer, Heraclitus, andthe tragedians in the political arena of vanity and ambition. Afterthe Persian wars, victorious Athenians lost their post-Homericsense of measure, and consequently lost their touch with reality.One indication of this is that the Athenians considered their mas-sacre of the inhabitants of Melos in 416 BC as a justifiable act ofstrategic pragmatism;9 they had become incapable of viewing theirhorrendous, hubristic crime as the act of genocidal barbarism itwas—for which crime they would ultimately suffer the retributionrequired by cosmic Justice (Nemesis), as prescribed by Heraclitus.

9. Thucydides, Histories, 5.84–111, which recounts the dialogue be-tween the Athenians and the besieged Melians. The Athenians assertedthe so-called right of the strongest, which they associated with pragma-tism as follows (5.89):


At the time, it must have been obvious to Aristotle that Greecestarted its self-destructive decline of going beyond measure as soonas the independent city-states formed interdependentt confedera-tions and expansionary alliances that battled one another over ahubristic and unrealistic prize—politico-economic dominance overall of Greece and even beyond. This was clearly an emulation ofthe Asian paradigm. It is quite characteristic of the classical periodthat the Parthenon was built with the worst of intentions: Pericleswanted to project the cultural and material power of a hegemonicAthens. It was only through the artistic genius of Phidias thatAthens erected a wonderous, diachronic manifestation of measure(that is, of beauty, balance and harmony) instead of a monstrousmonument to vanity and ambition.

In an attempt to check the demise of classical Greek civilza-tion, Aristotle tried to make clear philosophically the basic attrib-utes, the moral qualities, and the political principles that aresymbolized by the architecture and sculpture of the Parthenon. Hewas actually trying to revive the Apollonian spirit of the Battle ofMarathon, where two opposite value systems collided for the firsttime in history—the materialistic value system of Asia and the ide-alistic value system of pre-classical Greece, the former aiming atpower, the latter at virtue. This conflict of values is in the epigramat the battlefield of Marathon, said to be by Simonides of Ceos (ca.556–468 BC):10

The Athenians, fighting as the vanguard of all Greece,deprived the gold-bearing Persians of their power.(Hellēnōn promachountes Athēnaioi Marathōni, chru-sophorōn Mēdōn estoresan dunamin.)

Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals inpower, while the strong do what they can and the weak sufferwhat they must.(Dikaia men en to anthrōpeiōi logōi apo tēs isēs anankēs krine-tai, dunata de hoi prouchontes prassousi kai hoi astheneisxunchōrousin.)

10. John H. Molyneux, Simonides: A Historical Study (Wauconda, Illi-nois: Bolchazy–Caducci, 1992), 150.


Aristotle’s difficulty pertained to the materialism of his time.The Greeks, corrupted by Asian influences, had lost their senseof measure, and were carried away by the desire for affluenceand power. The loss of an intuitive sense cannot be easily resti-tuted. So Aristotle attempted to call the Greeks back to measureand hubris by appealing to the mind rather than the soul, throughreasoning rather than intuition—that is, through logic rather thanaesthetics. More specifically, Aristotle did not approach measuremerely as a self-evident condition that presents itself openly innatural beauty. For example, he did not argue that the massacreat Melos was a hubristic act because it was savagely messy andunnaturally ugly. Instead he tried to define measure and hubrisexplicitly and thus demonstrate to the Greeks that every act ofbarbarism is hubristic because it is extremely beyond measure.To Aristotle, extreme actions are temporary and self-destructive,while measured activities are sustainable and constructive. In thatcontext, Aristotle’s rational approach to measure tried to appealto the Greeks’ instinct of self-preservation, rather than to theirdegraded sense of aesthetics.

Aristotle’s logical approach to measure was ingenious andrealistic in the post-Socratic era of cultural decline, when Greekswere increasingly flirting with extremes like ostentatious con-sumption, abusive power, and the persecution—or even execu-tion—of men of virtue. But Aristotle faced a conceptual problem.A non-controversial, logically defined concept of measure inhuman affairs may well be an impossibility. One indication ofthis is the fact that the golden ratio φ is an irrational number thatdefies mathematical precision:

What is the ratio of [the temple’s] width to its height? Ican tell you exactly what it is, but not in numbers. I canalso tell it to you in numbers, but not exactly. It is ap-proximately 61.8 units wide and 38.2 units high. Thatwill get you in the ballpark and your eye will then adjustit to make the ratio exact, but it can be proven that nopair of numbers, to any finite precision, can accuratelyexpress this ratio, which is that formed by cutting a lineso that the whole has to its larger part the same ratio that


the larger part has to the smaller. We know many thingsby measuring, and our usual way of measuring is withnumbers, but in this case numbers are too crude an in-strument by which to know something our eyes know ata glance.11

And if measure in quantitative geometric dimensions defiesmathematical precision, then how much more difficult is the taskof devising an accurate definition of measure in qualitativehuman affairs?

Aristotle wisely did not conceive of a comprehensive defini-tion of measure, nor did he attempt to define measured behaviorin human affairs, because an imprecise definition would be con-troversial, and thus of limited practical use in policy making. Incontrast to Plato’s idealistic quest for an absolute value system, Ar-istotle formulated a pragmatic and relative definition of measure.He approached the concept of measure through successive logicalapproximations that involved real-life examples, metaphors, andimplicit analogies.

Aristotle conceived of measure as a subjective mean betweentwo opposite extremes, one of deficiency (elleipsis) and the otherof excess (hyperbolē) with respect to a desired goal. For example,courage (andreia) holds a mean position between one’s own feel-ings of fear (phobos) and overconfidence (tharsos). Such a meanis usually closer to one extreme than the other, depending on in-ternal trend (idiosyncrasy) and external circumstances (environ-ment), and consequently is not one and the same for everyone:12

Therefore of everything that is continuous and divisible,it is possible to take the larger part, or the smaller part,or an equal part, and these parts may be larger, smaller,and equal either with respect to the object itself or rela-tive to us; the equal part being a mean between excessand deficiency. By the mean of the object I denote a point

11. Sachs, “Measure, Moderation, and the Mean,” 7-8.12. Nicomachean Ethics 1106a25–35. Translations of the Ethics are byW. D. Ross (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1908) and H. Rackham (Cam-bridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1934) and edited by the author.


equally distant from either extreme, which is one and thesame for everybody; by the mean relative to us, thatamount which is neither too much nor too little, and thisis not one and the same for everybody. For example, if10 is considered many and 2 few, then 6 is consideredthe mean with respect to the object, because it exceedsand is exceeded by an equal amount and is the interme-diate according to arithmetical proportion. But we cannotderive the mean relative to us by this [arithmetical]method.(En panti dē sunechei kai diairetōi esti labein to menpleion to d’ elatton to d’ ison, kai tauta ē kat’ auto topragma ē pros hēmas:to d’ ison meson ti huperbolēs kaielleipseōs. Legō de tou men pragmatos meson to isonapechon aph’ hekaterou tōn akrōn, hoper estin hen kaito auto pasin, pros hēmas de ho mēte pleonaei mēteelleipei: touto d’ ouch hen, oude tauton pasin. Hoion eita deka polla ta de duo oliga, ta hex mesa lambanousikata to pragma: isōi gar huperechei te kai huperchetai:touto de meson esti kata tēn arithmētikēn analogian. Tode pros hēmas ouch houtō lēpteon.)

Aristotle here sets out two distinct types of mean, a lesserand a greater. The lesser type, the mean with respect to the object,is like a mere arithmetic average, static and objective. The greatertype, the mean relative to us, which is really the sort of measurethat applies to human thought and action, is dynamic and fluctu-ating. It is rarely midway between opposing extremes. Nor is itthe same for different people, because it is perceived subjectively.Nor does it remain the same, because it can evolve with changesof interal states and external conditions.

One example of this fluctuation might be the changing meas-ure of courage required by the Greeks in the Persian and Pelo-ponnesian wars. The Greeks needed an exceptionally high degreeof courage—that is, extreme fearlessness—when they were fight-ing for their very existence against the Persian invaders. In thePeloponnesian War, however, a less intense degree of courage—much closer to fearfulness—might have served them better, be-cause it might have prevented them from waging that civil war


in the first place, or, at least, might have induced them to put anend to the madness of that war earlier than they finally did. Thisshows that an adequate definition of measure in human affairsmust be subjective at an individual level, cultural at a macro-so-cial level, and always relative to changing external circum-stances. Such a definition would have to be dynamic rather thanstatic, as Aristotle himself hinted by the reference to continuityand divisibility at the opening of the above passage.

3. Sustainability

According to Aristotle, policies that are effective at present,and thus seem to be implemented according to measure, shouldstill be considered hubristic if their desired effects are unsustain-able in the foreseeable future. In this context, Aristotle uses themetaphor of the lifetime of a single individual, as shown in thefollowing passages from the Ethics:

For [happiness] requires, as we said, not only completevirtue but also a complete lifetime. Indeed, manychanges and vicissitudes of all sorts occur in one’s life-time, and the most prosperous man may fall into greatmisfortunes in old age, as is told of Priam in the Trojanepic; and no one calls happy a man who has experiencedsuch misfortunes and has passed away miserably(1100a4-9).(Dei gar, hōsper eipomen, kai aretēs teleias kai biouteleiou. Pollai gar metabolai ginontai kai pantoiai tuchaikata ton bion, kai endechetai ton malist’ euthēnountamegalais sumphorais peripesein epi gērōs, kathaper entois Trōikois peri Priamou mutheuetai: ton de toiautaischrēsamenon tuchais kai teleutēsanta athliōs oudeis eu-daimonizei.)Therefore what would prohibit us from saying that he ishappy who is active in accordance with complete virtueand is sufficiently equipped with external goods, not forsome chance period but throughout his complete life-time? Or must we add “and who is destined to live thusand die accordingly”? Because the future is hidden fromus, and we consider happiness as a teleological goal,


something utterly and absolutely complete. And if this isso, we shall pronounce happy those among the living inwhom these conditions are, and are to be, fulfilled—and[we’ll call them] happy human beings (1101a14-20).(Ti oun kōluei legein eudaimona ton kat’ aretēn teleianenergounta kai tois ektos agathois hikanōs kechorēgē-menon mē ton tuchonta chronon alla teleion bion; ē pros-theteon kai biōsomenon houtō kai teleutēsonta katalogon; epeidē to mellon aphanes hēmis estin, tēn eudai-monian de telos kai teleion tithemen pantēi pantōs. ei d’houtō, makarious eroumen tōn zōntōn hios huparchei kaihuparxei ta lechthenta, makarious d’ anthrōpous.)

The implied analogy is obvious: The lifetime of an individualmay span three to four generations (say, 60–80 years), while thehistorical course of a city-state normally spans many more gen-erations (say, several centuries). A man should be consideredhappy only if he lives a measured life during his entire lifetime,away from the pitfalls of extreme misfortune and misery. Like-wise a city-state should be considered successful only if it appliesmeasured policies with effects that are sustainable in an intergen-erational historical period.

On the basis of this analogy, a definition of measure in indi-vidual behavior and political organization must satisfy the axiomof sustainability, which is the criterion for discerning betweenactual measure, which is sustainable, and illusory measure,which is unsustainable. For example, the shared confusion of

Fig. 2: Unsustainable Aesthetic Mess in Contemporary Athens


contemporary Greeks about the difference between real develop-ment and illusory development is manifested by the city theyhave built all around the Parthenon in the post-WWII era: Athensis one of the ugliest and most polluted capital cities in Europe(Fig. 2). Of course, there are many terribly polluted cities in theworld, but Athens is unique. The city surrounds the Parthenonchaotically, as if the surrealistic pandemonium of the formerthreatens to engulf the Apollonian harmony of the latter. For sixconsecutive decades (1949–2009), while the contemporaryGreeks were building their grotesque city, they thought they weredeveloping their economy in accordance with measure. After all,they did provide work and housing for millions of Greek peasantswho emigrated from their villages to the new, “modern” Athens.During that period, under the spell of Atē, most Greeks were in-capable of seeing what was obvious to sight—namely, the visualactuality that their city is a heap of aesthetic hubris lying allaround the Parthenon. As a consequence, they were unable totake corrective action in time. Only recently, under the specterof Nemesis, did the Greeks start to re-evaluate their perceptionof progress. Now at last, Athenians can see that their city, and thehubristic model of economic development that underlies it, havebeen unsustainable all along.13

This manifestation of Athenian hubris around the Parthenonis symptomatic of the world’s industrial hubris in regard to planetearth. Contemporary Athens was built as a gargantuan labor citythat would allegedly provide an ample supply of cheap labor toheavy industry nearby, at Eleusis, the former site of the Eleusin-ian Mysteries. At a global level, unbounded materialistic expan-sion has crowded out the Apollonian tradition. The echo of theidealistic values of the victors in the Battle of Marathon is be-coming increasingly attenuated in the era of so-called globaliza-tion. Unlimited economic growth on a planet with limited

13. Nicos Souliotis, “Cultural Economy, Sovereign Debt Crisis and the Im-portance of Local Contexts: The Case of Athens,” CITIES: The InternationalJournal of Urban Policy and Planning 33 (2013): 61–68.


resources is not merely unsustainable. It is irrational.It is too late for the Athenians, because their aesthetic blind-

ness has already brought upon them the current retribution ofsocio-economic Nemesis. The pressing question now is whetherit is too late for humanity as well, in view of the climatic Nemesisthat seems is appearing on the horizon. Aberrations from measurecannot survive the forces of nature for long. Nemesis always in-tervenes, sooner or later, to restore beauty, harmony and balance,which are all associated with sustainability.14

Even in judicial practice and strategic analysis, the conceptsof measure and justice are sometimes associated with the notionof sustainability.15 For example, akin to the concept of measureis the legal principle of reciprocity or lex talionis (legal equiva-lence, as in “equivalent retaliation”), as well as the popular say-ing “tit for tat.” They trace their origins to the Biblical scripture“an eye for an eye”16 and the Babylonian legal code, enacted in1772 BC by Hammurabi, the sixth king of Babylon. Ham-murabi’s code included no provision for extenuating circum-stances to modify a prescribed punishment. According toAristotle though, proportionate reciprocity with qualification thattakes account of circumstances, that is, retribution with measure,

14. Patricia Grant, “An Aristotelian Approach to Sustainable Business,”Corporate Governance 11.1 (2008): 4–14.15. Stefan Baumgärtner and Martin Quaas, “What is Sustainability Eco-nomics?” University of Lüneburg Working Paper Series in Economics,138 (2009): 3, available at http://hdl.handle.net/10419/30222: “The vi-sion of sustainability aims at justice in the domain of human-nature re-lationships and in view of the long-term and inherently uncertain future.This includes three specific relationships . . . : (i) justice between hu-mans of different generations (intergenerational justice), (ii) justice be-tween different humans of the present generation (intragenerational”justice), and (iii) justice between humans and nature (physiocentricethics).”16. The Biblical commandment “an eye for an eye” is literally “an eyeunder an eye” (Leviticus 24:19–21; Exodus 21:22–25; Deuteronomy19:16–21).


is the sort of justice that safeguards the sustainability of the city-state (Ethics, 1132b33-35):

this sort of justice does hold men together: reciprocity inaccordance with a proportion and not on the basis of pre-cisely equal return. For it is by proportionate requital thatthe city-state holds together.(Sunechei to toiouton dikaion, to antipeponthos kat’analogian kai mē kat’ hisotēta. Tōi antipoiein gar ana-logon summenei hē polis.)

The principle of just retribution is the conceptual basis ofmeasured response, which is a highly effective strategy in gametheory in the iterated prisoner’s dilemma.17 But under extraordi-nary circumstances, a policy of reciprocity may be too rigid andineffective if it does not satisfy the axiom of sustainability. Forinstance, the Treaty of Versailles in 1919 imposed war reparationsbeyond measure upon Germany after World War I. Those retribu-tive payments were unsustainable. As consequence, the Germaneconomy was soon ruined, and ultimately its political system col-lapsed in 1933. After the war, during the military occupation ofGermany (1945-1949), retaliative justice was of little use to theAllies when they had to decide how to respond sustainably to theHolocaust. The proper response could not be to visit anotherHolocaust on the Germans. Instead, sustainability took centerstage in shaping U.S. policies with respect to Germany, as shownin the fifth paragraph of the Joint Chiefs of Staff directive 1067,issued to General Eisenhower in April 1945: “The principal Al-lied objective is to prevent Germany from ever again becominga threat to the peace of the world [italics mine].”

In particular, German reparations to the Allies were rathermoderate and non-monetary, such as technology transfers fromGermany to the U.S. and Russia,18 or capital equipment transfers

17. Anatol Rappoport and Albert M. Chammah, Prisoner’s Dilemma(Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1965).18. John Gimbel, Science, Technology, and Reparations: Exploitationand Plunder in Postwar Germany (Stanford: Stanford University Press,1990), 171.


to France and Russia—primarily from dismantled German mili-tary factories and heavy industry.19 Aiming at sustainability, theWestern Allies implemented an imaginative mix of policies, in-cluding: immediate apprehension of war criminals for punish-ment, control over German education, disarmament anddemilitarization, a federal form of government for post-WWIIGermany, now to be called the Federal Republic of Germany(FRG), participation of the FRG in supranational organizations,like OEEC and later OECD, integration of the German economyinto an orderly and prosperous Europe, generous restructuring ofthe foreign debt of the FRG by about 50% in 1953,20 a reparationsagreement between the FRG and Israel with respect to the Holo-caust, internationalization of the FRG’s entire Armed Forcesunder NATO command, and ever-continuing stationing of unitsof the U.S. Armed Forces in Germany as forward enablers.

With respect to sustainability, the treatment of defeated Ger-many by the Allies was a measured policy, and because of this ithas endured and has served the cause of peace in Europe formany decades. In the wake of the tragedy of World War II, thegreatest war in human history, moderation and sustainabilitywere the two principles that guided Europe safely, in measure,on the path of Aristotelian catharsis.21

4. Conclusion

For millennia, from the age of Homer to the present, philosophyhas failed to provide a comprehensive definition of measure with

19. Norman M. Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A history of theSoviet Zone of occupation 1945-1949. (Cambridge, MA : Harvard Uni-versity Press, 1995), 206.20. Timothy W. Guinnane, “Financial Vergangenheitsbewaeltigung: The1953 London Debt Agreement,” Yale University Economic GrowthCenter Research Paper Series 880 (New Haven: Yale University, 2004),22 and 24–25. Available at http://ssrn.com/ abstract=49380221. As first noted by Aristotle (Poetics, 1449b28), the characteristic at-tribute of tragedy in the theater is that “through pity and fear it effectsrelief (catharsis) to these and similar emotions” (di’ eleou kai phobouperainousa tēn tōn toioutōn pathēmatōn katharsin).


respect to human behavior. If measure is “due proportion,” thenwhat exactly is “due”? And if it is a “subjective mean” betweentwo extremes, one of deficiency and the other of excess, closerto one extreme than the other, then how much closer? So far, nomagic number (like φ) or undisputed formula has been conceivedfor defining measure in human behavior and economics .

This indeterminacy in the concept of measure, coupled withthe human impulsive tendency to excess, has made many indi-viduals, societies, and states prone to hubristic aberrations frommeasure. And as soon as people lose their sense of measure, theyalso lose their touch with reality.22 But even if they lose thatsense, they might still be able to detect such aberrations by usingthe criterion of sustainability.

In this respect, rational analysis of sustainability is a second-best and time-consuming methodological tool when compared toinstantaneous aesthetic appraisal of human activity with respectto beauty, balance, and harmony. The Nazis would not haveneeded a rational analysis of their genocidal hubris if they onlycould have seen the ugliness, the monstrosity, and the barbarityof their concentration camps. They might then have returned totheir senses by themselves, in time. Similarly, open-minded res-idents of Athens, Detroit, or Shanghai, might not have needed anelaborate analysis of sustainability if they could have seen forthemselves what is instantly clear to the eye, namely, the deadend of hubristic economic development.

But for those who are short-sighted or blind with regard tomeasure, the Aristotelian criterion of sustainability might well beenlightening.23

22. Do humans really have a sense of measure? The answer to this ques-tion is a part of a discussion that includes the question of the best humanlife. This inquiry demands philosophic reflection, but such reflectionwould not be possible if one could not, in the first place, simply see itsform (Sachs, “Measure, Moderation, and the Mean,” 22).23. Indicators and measures of sustainability derived from the CanadianReport of the Alberta Round Table on Environment and Economy (1993)are listed at www.iisd.org/educate/learn/measures.htm.

Platonic TheōriaMark Shiffman

Plato’s dialogues incite us to think about both the words we useand the phenomena we are trying to understand by means ofthose words. In some cases the relationship between word andphenomena provides the explicit theme of the dialogue, as in thecase of justice (dikaiosunē) in the Republic or knowledge(epistēmē) in the Theaetetus. There are other themes, however,that remain implicit and revolve around words that require us tothink more generally about the relationship of words and phe-nomena—for example, speech (logos) or wonder (thaumazein).The latter class would include theōria, which we tend to translateas “contemplation” and which seems to suggest a more direct,less word-bound relationship to the phenomena, a kind of insightthe dialogues seek to foster but cannot encapsulate in words.

But of course theōria is a word, and a peculiar one. Do weunderstand this word, and do we understand the phenomena itbespeaks? Let us ask a question the dialogues never directly raise:What is theōria? To what does the word refer, or toward whatdoes it gesture? To reflect on this question, we must reflect onhow the word theōria is used in the dialogues. When we do, wewill notice several things: 1) the language of theōria (includingthe related verb theōrein and noun theōros) has meanings inGreek before Plato, and the dialogues use these words in waysrelated to but departing from their previous uses; 2) there is nosimply identifiable single meaning of theōria in the dialogues;3) outside of the Laws, in which Socrates does not appear, theonly character who uses “theoric” language in these innovativelyvaried ways is (with a single exception) Socrates; and 4) his useof this language varies in relation to the demands of the particular

Mark Shiffman is Associate Professor in the Department of Humanitiesat Villanova University.

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interlocutor and conversation. The question then becomes: Howshould we understand what Plato depicts Socrates as doing bymeans of the language of theōria?

I: The Range of “Theoric” Terms

In a century in which the meanings of theōria and theōrein be-come quite flexible, they reach their maximum flexibility in thePlatonic dialogues. In the attested uses we have from the 540’sto the 420’s (from Theognis, Aeschylus, and Herodotus to Aristo-phanes, Euripides, and Lysias) we find a group of meanings forwords of the theōr- root which we may call “traditional,” in thesense that they are clearly distinguishable in the early authors andcontinue in a relatively ossified use through later ones:

1. theōros: a delegate to consult the Oracle (later: theōria as a delegation and theōrein as participating in a delegation)

2. theōria: a sacred festival involving games or performancestheōrein: attending or being a spectator at such festivals (later: theōros as festival-delegate, theōria as festival-delegation)

3. theōros: observer of an unusual spectacletheōria: the spectacle or its observation (usually as “sightseeing”)theōrein: observing such a spectacle

These ordinary denotations of the words share certain character-istics: the viewer travels away from his customary setting andenters into an attentiveness that differs from his everyday attitudetoward familiar beings.

From the 420s to the 320s, in Thucydides, Xenophon, Plato,Isocrates, and Aristotle, these words receive metaphorical exten-sions of meaning that differ with each author, but share a commoncharacter.1 By evoking physical and psychic displacement and

1. Thucydides 3.23.4.4 and 4.93.1.5. Xenophon, Anabasis 1.2.16 and2.4.25–6; Hellenica 4.5.6; Cyropaideia 4.3.3; Memorabilia 4.8.7; Sympo-sium 7.3. Isocrates Busiris 46, To Nicocles 35.6, Antidosis 277.1–4, Evagoras29.3, 73.9, 76.5, and Epistle 6.12.10, On the Peace 74.5, Nicocles or theCyprians 17.5–7, and Panathenaicus 21.7, 39.2–40.4 and 222.6.


the absorbing spectacles constitutive of traditional theōria, eachauthor highlights experiences in which we are drawn out of oureveryday mode of attentiveness into the presence of somethingexceptional. The story of Aristotle’s innovations in theoric lan-guage (besides requiring a prior account of Plato’s) is vast andcomplex. Whereas the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae gives roughly125 instances up to the fourth century of words with the theōr-root in authors other than Aristotle (54 of which occur in Plato),in the Aristotelian corpus it locates nearly 700, only a handful ofwhich bear traditional senses. What we can say is that theōria inthe sense of attention to noetic objects and Aristotle’s coinage ofthe adjective theōrētikos (especially as used to describe a way oflife) achieved remarkable success in subsequent philosophicalusage and became new ossified terms. After Aristotle, innovationin theoric language effectively comes to an end.2

Plato exhibits the greatest variety of innovative denotationsof theoric terms. 22 instances bear traditional senses. In the other32 cases we find extensions beyond the traditional circle of mean-ings that we may classify according to the following benchmarks:

1. Adaptation of traditional sense to imagined social/politicalcontext (Laws 12, 950d–952d)

2. Traditional theoric settings, nontraditional acts of attention(Laws 650a7, 815b4; Lysis 206e9)

3. Observation of other persons for the sake of judging them (Laws772a1, 781c4; Gorgias 523e4)

4. Observation of nonhuman entities for the sake of judging them(Laws 663c4; Philebus 42b3; Theaetetus 177e2)

5. Observation of particulars for the sake of recognizing a generalpattern (Laws 695c6; Philebus 53d9; Phaedo 99d6)

6. Beholding beautiful/noble things without (apparent) ulterior end(Symposium 210d4; Gorgias 474d8–9; Phaedrus 276b4, 276d5;

2. Subtle and interesting changes take place in the Greek ChurchFathers’ writings about the relationship between prayer and knowl-edge, but these are best understood as modifications of the specif-ically Aristotelian sense of the words.

97ESSAYS & LECTURES | SHIFFMAN

Republic 529b3, 601a2 and a7, 606b1, 607d1)

7. Beholding transcendent beings or forms (Phaedrus 247c1, d4; Republic 486a8, 511c6, 517d5; Phaedo 65e2, 109e8 [ambiguously])

All these varied extensions of the range of theoric language inPlato involve attention to particular beings, whether identified asspecifically as certain individual persons or as generically as “justthings,” “beautiful/noble things,” or “pleasures and pains.” Thebeholding of transcendent beings that comes to be associated withthe philosophic sense of the words constitutes a quite deliberateextension of meaning, always used in relation to other senses ofthe words theōria and theōrein in the same dialogues.

This “contemplative” sense, then, is only one of a broadspectrum of senses in Plato, by no means more common than oth-ers (6 or 7 instances out of 54), and not the only distinctly Pla-tonic extension of the meaning of these words (since headings 4through 6 above are distinctly Platonic innovations as well). Withthis in mind, let us examine the three dialogues–Phaedrus,Phaedo, and Republic–in which these words seem to denote orsuggest transcendent vision of eternal truth, which is both themaximum metaphorical extension of their traditional sense andthe sense of the word most distinctively associated with Plato andhis characterization of the philosophic experience.

II: The Phaedrus

In Phaedrus, a dialogue which concerns artful composition, in-novative senses of the verb theōrein appear in two nearly sym-metric pairs (247c1, d4 and 276b4, d5). The first two cases occurwithin the Palinode’s description of the soul’s journey to the outercosmos and the region of the true beings. The word theōrein isnot, however, predicated of human souls, but only of those of thegods. Since the horses of their chariots are well-behaved, the gods(or their souls) can stand erect at the edge of the heavens andgaze untroubled at the truth beyond (247b6–d4). The soul of theman capable of following the gods to the limit is troubled by its


horses and at best only able to scarcely have a look (248a4).3 Thiswhole festive procession of the gods going to a remarkable spec-tacle with their clients in train recalls the festival-going type oftraditional theōrein.4 Socrates appropriately applies this word tothe gods in contradistinction to the human souls because of theirfocused attention given to the thing seen, a dimension of tradi-tional theōrein carried over into all the innovative uses. The godsgaze steadily, while the human souls look only with a divided at-tention, most of it elsewhere.5 Transcendent theōrein is beyondthe power of the human soul even in the proximity to eternal be-ings imagined in the Palinode, and thus a fortiori to the embodiedsoul in this life.

The other two instances of theōrein in this dialogue, by con-trast, have as their objects beautiful but ephemeral products ofhuman artifice. In discussing the appropriate way to engage inwriting, Socrates likens the author to a farmer. The latter is seri-ous about the crop from which he derives sustenance and profit;he would not plant these seeds in a forcing garden for the pleasureof ephemeral gazing, but would only engage in such planting inplay or for the sake of a festival (276b1–5). So too, the writerwho is serious about the just, beautiful, and good will write onlyas a recreation, delightedly gazing on his delicate productionswithout expecting anything else to come of them, unless a spurto memory in old age, and perhaps an aid to those pursuing thesame paths of inquiry (276d1–5).

3. While 247d2-4 seems to leave open the possibility that a human soul,“insofar as it has a care for receiving what befits it,” can also experiencetheōria, the strong contrast of gods and humans at 248a1 appears to min-imize if not eliminate this possibility.4. At the City Dionysia, for example, Athenians were divided into tribeswhile proceeding to and sitting in the theater, and each tribe was repre-sented by one general pouring libations and one judge of the competi-tions (see Sara Monoson Plato’s Democratic Entanglements: AthenianPolitics and the Practice of Philosophy [Princeton, NJ: Princeton Uni-versity Press, 2000], 92–96).5. Accordingly, at 278c Socrates insists that only a god could be wise,while men can at best be lovers of wisdom.


The key to understanding the relationship between these twopairs of instances lies in the character of Phaedrus, whose worldis bounded by his love of speeches. At the outset of the dialogue,Socrates finds Phaedrus on his way out of the city to commit tomemory a speech of Lysias that has particularly impressed him.The lewd insinuation of Socrates’s reference to the scroll ofLysias’s speech Phaedrus clutches in his left hand under his cloak(228d6–7) suggests the fruitlessness of his love of the writtenword. This suggestion associates him both with the farmer whoputs his efforts into non-nourishing hothouse plants and with theintemperate lovers of the Palinode, whose bodily gratification oferos prevents the nourishing stream of beauty from flowing tothe wings of the soul that, if grown, would lift them up to theirtrue heavenly nourishment (251a–b).

The implicit critique of Phaedrus as one distracted from truenourishment by love of speeches receives its most pointed ex-pression immediately after the Palinode. In the face of Socrates’slyrical account of true beauty and its benefits to the soul, Phae-drus distinctly manifests his fixation on artificial beauty by pro-fessing his admiration for the beauty of the speech only insofaras it raises a formidable challenge to the skills of Lysias (257c2);he is impervious to the inspiration of its imaginative content asit applies to his own soul. Socrates responds to Phaedrus’s im-passibility by implicitly comparing him to the cicadas, who wereonce men who became so mad for music that they ceased to careabout food and drink. Plato has Socrates warn Phaedrus (and thereader) not to be bewitched by literary artistry into a self-oblivi-ous aestheticism that would distract us from caring about our ownsouls in relation to the truth–or in Socrates’s words, about wherewe are coming from and where we are going (227a1) and whetherour soul is monstrous or not (230a).6

Socrates, by contrast, professes himself a lover of the livingspeech of dialectic (266b3–4). Thus, in the agricultural analogy,

6. The initial indication of Phaedrus’ self–oblivion is that, entranced bythe prospect of conning Lysias’s speech, he in fact does not know wherehe is coming from or going to. He claims to be coming from Lysias, when


he stands parallel to the farmer who plants a serious crop. In thesame breath, he claims that when he finds a man naturally ableto make dialectical divisions and groupings, he follows him likea god (266b5–7). Thus, in the realm of speeches, he is the equiv-alent of the Palinode’s true lover, whose reverence for the godlikebeloved enables him to follow in the train of the god in the cir-cuits of the heavens (251a1–7) and thus to attain in small measurethe true nourishment of the soul. Like the vision of the beautifulbeloved chastely endured, the practice of dialectic helps the soulregain something of the nourishing vision of the intelligibles.

It seems then that in each half of the dialogue Socrates usestheōrein to denote the highest kind of delight: in the cosmos ofthe Palinode, this is the delight of unperturbed gazing on the full-ness of truth and being; in Phaedrus’s world, the same place isoccupied by the undisturbed delight in masterful speeches. Thereversal of its valence from the first pair of instances to the sec-ond–from lyrically celebrated height of the soul’s destiny to crit-ically exposed squandering of the soul’s best labors–emphasizesthe opposite tendencies of Phaedrus’s hedonistic and effete loveof speeches and Socrates’s love of dialectic. Socrates first usestheōrein to express the ideal, however unreachable by humans,that may be imagined as polestar and spur to the philosophic en-terprise. He then uses it to express the idle and fruitless delightin beautiful speeches that makes an idol of man’s power to pro-duce beauty, and so obscures the natural connection betweenbeauty and truth.

At the same time, Plato also dramatizes the problematic char-acter of dialectic, which occupies an ambiguous status betweenthese two poles of theōrein. If dialectic is a process of groupingand dividing according to classes, and these classes are necessar-ily delineated by man, what can guarantee that they bring us inthe direction of the divine theōrein, if the reference point of thatdivine experience itself, as a steady vision of all truth, is beyond

he is in fact being spiritually drawn to him by his love for his speechwrit-ing prowess; and the countryside walk he is heading toward on the adviceof his physician friend is in fact a flight from the threat of ill health (227a).


the sure reach of man? May these delineations not turn into be-witching and calcified products of our speech? That is a phenom-enon dialectic must continually confront and seek to overcome,supported by partial intuitions of the natural and intelligiblewhole but without sure and final knowledge of it.

III: The Phaedo

In Plato’s Phaedo, we find theoric language again associated withthe aims and practice of dialectic and the problem of self-obliv-ion. The words theōria and theōrein occur in the dialogue threetimes each: theōria thrice in the traditional sense of an officialdelegation to Delos (in the conversation between Phaedo andEchecrates that frames the narrated dialogue), and theōrein in un-traditional senses within the dialogue itself, in response to theunfolding of the philosophical drama.

Socrates’s interlocutors, Simmias and Cebes, are associatesof the Pythagorean Philolaus (61d), who prioritizes the mathe-matical, musical and cosmological aspects of Pythagorean teach-ing over its “religious” (cultic and ritual) aspects.7 Accordingly,Simmias and Cebes are devoted to investigation of nature, andtreat the question of the soul’s immortality with skepticism, pro-fessing uncertainty regarding the rationale for the Pythagoreanprohibition of suicide.

Socrates develops his explanation of philosophy as prepara-tion for death by conversing with the two Pythagoreans in thecultic idiom underemphasized in their branch of the tradition. Hespeaks of philosophy as a kind of purification of the soul fromthe influence of the body, thus suggesting a strong dualism of thekind necessarily implied by the Pythagorean claim that bodiesand souls are two different things that can be sundered and re-joined in reincarnation.

In the context of this explanation the verb theōrein first oc-curs, when Socrates introduces the question of the “just itself,”

7. See Walter Burkert, Lore and Science in Ancient Pythagoreanism(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1972), pp.176–208, 277,298, 480.


(along with the beautiful and good, greatness, health andstrength). He asks:

Is that which is truest in them seen [theōreitai]through the body, or is it like this: whoever of us bestand most precisely prepares himself to think abouteach thing he investigates will come closest to know-ing each thing? (65e1-4)

At first reading, the question might seem to be, “Do we theōreinthese things through the body, or rather through thinking?”Strictly speaking, however, the verb theōrein applies only (andinterrogatively) to the hypothetical sense-activity of the body.The weight of Pythagorean doctrine might however lead one toconstrue it as applying also to the activity of the intellect in whichthe purifying preparation culminates–especially as Socrates in-vokes the language of purification characteristic of the Orphicmysteries, with their revelations of extraordinary knowledge tothe initiates (65e6, 69d).8 Socrates’s grammatical ellipsis thussuggests (without itself necessarily reproducing) the Pythagoreantendency to understand soul and its phenomena by analogy tobody, as a body-like, localizable and separable thing. It is left forthe reader to wonder whether the proper cognition of what istruest is best characterized as theōrein.

The Pythagorean and Orphic cultic mysteries explicitly pro-fess that the purification of the soul is accompanied by a privi-leged and salvific knowledge. Soul is understood above all aspure intellect, while passions, which perturb the purity of the in-tellect, are understood as bodily. This perspective governs the en-tire first half of the dialogue; the first three “proofs” ofimmortality depend upon the identification of soul with pure in-tellect. Only in the second half of the dialogue does the soul asprinciple of life enter into the reasoning.

This implicit cultic-Pythagorean identification of soul as pureintellect, unrelated to but entangled with body, is reproduced inan obscured form in rationalist Pythagoreanism, insofar as thelatter is wholly devoted to pure intellectual attainments. Thuswhile the older Pythagorean tradition occupies its adherents with

8. “Orphism and Pythagoreanism were almost inextricably intertwinedin the fifth century” (Burkert 1972, 39).


transformation of the soul in a self-attentive discipline of life, thenewer strand, devoted to scientific knowledge, leaves in obscuritythe concrete interplay of soul and body in the passions, engen-dering forgetfulness of the soul and lack of self-knowledge.

Socrates’s turn to the discussion of misology that occupiesthe second half of the dialogue seems incited (at least in part) byhis recognition that Cebes is afflicted by this self-oblivion. WhenSocrates addresses the relationship between types of soul and thelives and destinies belonging to them (81e–84b), Cebes, hithertoso quick to follow Socrates’s meaning, has difficulty understand-ing at almost every turn. His hesitations suggest the followingdeficiencies of awareness: he has not thought about the varietyof kinds of soul (81e); he has no sense of the relative happinessof virtuous, nonintellectual citizens (82b); he has no definite con-ception of that from which philosophy offers the soul liberation(82d); he has paid little attention to the drama of the soul’s pas-sions in response to the freedom offered by philosophy, especiallythe influence passions have on the intellect (83c); and he has noconcrete notion of the dynamics by which the soul becomes riv-eted to the influence of the body (83d). In short, he understandssoul only in schematic terms of the opposition of body and intel-lect, and not through firsthand attentiveness to the complexity ofits real possibilities for order and disorder.

After some silent reflections (perhaps on these shortcomingsof Cebes), Socrates brings into the foreground the influence ofpassions on thought, in three ways.

First, in rejecting the common interpretation of the swan’ssong as a lament, Socrates appeals to the regularity of naturalphenomena–observing that no other bird sings when it is anxiousor fearful–in a way that is surely welcome to his hearers. But healso points out that the intellectual failure of humans to note thisregularity and apply it to the swan is due to a passion, namelyfear of death, which they mistakenly project onto the swan (84e–85a).

Second, sensing the depressing effect on the hearers of theobjections by Simmias and Cebes to the immortality thesis,Socrates warns against misology (89d–90d). Misology arises


when one has the repeated experience of accepting the truth ofarguments uncritically and then seeing them fall prey to criti-cism—probably an experience familiar to these rationalistPythagoreans, especially with regard to the school’s doctrines re-garding the soul, and especially to Cebes, the more obstinatecritic.9 Socrates warns that we are prone to grow disillusionedwith argument as such, rather than blame our own weakness asarguers. He shows himself a keen observer of souls, one who un-derstands their aspirations and disappointments and how theseinfluence their interpretation of reason itself.

Third, Socrates offers himself as an example of the influenceof passion on the soul’s engagement in reasoning (91a). Heclaims to be worried that, under the influence of fear of death, heis approaching the argument about immortality in the spirit ofthose who merely want to win a case. He confesses to pleonexiaand philonikia, grasping after more than his due and infatuationwith victory, and thus exhibits the critical self-knowledge heseeks to engender.

By articulating these pitfalls of the intellect brought about bypassions, Socrates makes manifest a middle ground upon whichthe two influence one another, the true ground on which purifi-cation of the soul must take place. What he exemplifies is not anobjectivity of pure intellection insulating itself from all that isforeign to its purity, but rather a self-critical awareness of the mu-tual influence of reason and passion that will allow a proper vig-ilance of the soul’s activity in pursuit of understanding, both inoneself and in others. In this understanding, passion does not be-long entirely to the body or to the soul; but the understanding ofpassion and its relationship to thought belongs integrally to thesoul’s self-understanding. Soul is not a being like other beings of

9. Simmias shows himself willing to be convinced of doctrines he alreadybelieves by the first argument that offers itself, though he is always happy tohear more (73b). The suicide prohibition, which is connected with the wholecomplex of Pythagorean doctrines about the soul, had been communicatedto Simmias and Cebes by Philolaus and others (presumably Pythagoreans),but apparently without sufficient supporting argumentation (61e).


which we render account, first because it is the soul that mustrender that account, and second because we can only render ac-count of soul itself by means of self-knowledge. This differenceis not dualistic, like that between two comparable beings wemight account for in the world known by soul, but is a differencethat keeps the relationship between such different modes of beingas puzzling as it ought to be.

As a result of his inattention to the phenomena of soul, Cebesfails both to attain self-knowledge and to distinguish the soulfrom other kinds of being. His last argument against immortalitycompares body and soul to a man and a cloak (88a-b). Even if asoul outlasts a body, might it not eventually wear down throughsuccessive incarnations? Thus soul appears as something affectedthe way bodies are in its dealings with bodies. Beings are all onone level; what appears as a body-soul dualism is really a kindof monism of the ontological imagination. The attempt to accountfor all beings in the same terms (in the case of Pythagoreans,through number) leads to the overzealous hopes that end in mis-ology.

Thus, in his attempt to counter the threat of misology,Socrates proposes what he calls his “second sailing,” a disciplineof conversation that allows the eidetic determination of a thingto appear in its distinctness.10 As eidetic, it is distinct in statusfrom its embodiments; as a determination, it is distinct from othereidetic determinations. In this context Socrates uses the verbtheōrein (99d6) once again in relation to those things he “neverstops saying, both at other times and in the earlier speech”

10. To be precise, the second sailing seems to refer to one or more of sev-eral things. The first, on the procedural level, is the so–called “method ofhypothesis.” The second is the result of Socrates’s applying that procedureto the problem of the aitios, namely the resort to “participation in forms”as the best explanation for why things are as they are. Cebes and Simmiasassent to this result (102a1), and it, rather than the procedural principle,informs the subsequent discussion. It may also refer to the implied turn to“the human things,” to the soul’s self–understanding as the necessary start-ing point for all philosophizing. It is beyond the scope of this essay to at-tempt to clarify the relationship among these three meanings.


(100b1–2), namely that the beautiful and good and great them-selves with respect to themselves “are something.”11 That is, herefers explicitly back to the very discussion in which he previ-ously used the verb theōrein.

In that earlier discussion, it seemed that, in keeping with themystery-structure, the process of purification by “looking at eachthing with thought alone” served as preparation for seeing the“itself with respect to itself” as a culmination. Here, however, thereverse is clearly the case. Socrates finds it safest to begin fromthese things (100b5) if he is to think properly about them so asto make progress toward the truth. It is the identification of whatbelongs to the thing discussed wholly with respect to its own de-termination that provides Socrates and his interlocutor with aninitial clarity of communication, upon which basis they can pro-ceed to further clarification of the question at hand.12 They arenot likely to arrive at a grand cosmic vision as Socrates had oncehoped, and as the earlier discussion of the “in-itself,” also pur-sued in the spirit of the “first sailing,” may have suggested.

Accordingly, Socrates here uses theōrein to refer, not to theculmination of the soul’s journey of inquiry, but rather to a whollynatural, though out of the ordinary, kind of seeing. He speaks ofthose “looking at (theōrountes) and investigating (skopoumenoi)the eclipsing sun,” which he compares to investigating the causesof natural things by looking at the natural things themselves. Theresult of both is a kind of blindness. By contrast, when he speaksof seeking the truth of beings in speeches, he talks only of “in-vestigating” (skopein, 99e5–6); and to reinforce this implicit con-

11. Ti einai, here as also at 65d5. 12. This, for Gadamer, is the crucial difference between the Socratic ap-proach to philosophizing and what is typically desired by the interlocutors(including the readers): “In the final analysis, our wanting to think of theparticipation of existent things in being as a relationship of existent thingsto each other always involves us in a false concretion. Instead we woulddo better to acknowledge from the start that this participation is the pointof departure for all meaningful talk of the idea and of the universal” (“TheProofs of Immortality in Plato’s Phaedo,” in Dialogue and Dialectic: Eighthermeneutical Studies of Plato, tr. P. Christopher Smith (New Haven: YaleUniversity Press, 1986), pp.124-5 (emphasis mine).


trast, he immediately and emphatically rejects a too strict analogybetween his visual image and the phenomena of investigation inspeeches (99e6–100a3). Theōrein here names an activity of thebodily senses that quite clearly should not serve as a model forthe activity of the inquiring mind.

Socrates delivers this account, which rejects understandingnatural things in terms of generation, in response to Cebes’s nat-uralistic notion of the dissolution of soul—a problem which, ac-cording to Socrates, would require “a thorough examination ofthe cause of generation and destruction” (95e9). Socrates implic-itly warns Cebes that his mode of inquiry will produce only blind-ness and disappointment. By means of the second sailing,Socrates and Cebes make some progress in clarifying the ques-tion starting out from agreement about what is strictly proper tosoul. Ultimately, however, Cebes fails to adhere to this discipline.He makes the mistake, which Socrates does not explicitly correct,of deducing the soul’s inability to suffer corruption from itsdeathlessness (106d).

As Socrates implies in his somewhat evasive response toCebes’s confident assertion, one might properly say that soul isdeathless by virtue of its eidetic determination, since the presenceof soul in a thing necessarily entails the presence of life. Soul asan object of the intellect can also be strictly considered not liableto corruption by virtue of its eidetic status as such, to which thequestion of corruption would be simply irrelevant. Neither prem-ise enables us to conclude anything about the perdurance of ac-tual living souls.

In applying a determination of the eidos of soul as such tothe level of instantiation (i.e. equating deathlessness of soul assoul with incorruptibility of any given soul), Cebes exhibits whatAristotle will later identify as a characteristic flaw of Pythagoreanmetaphysics: By making number the being of things, Pythagore-anism fails to distinguish numbers, as intelligibles without qual-ities, from the sensible entities they are supposed to compose.13

13. Metaphysics 1090a31–b2. Compare Gadamer, p.112: “Plato . . . is notsimply Pythagorean. On the contrary, he explicitly distinguishes the noetic


Thus, even within the structure of the cosmos apprehended bysoul, Pythagoreanism fails to discern the eidetic determinationsthrough which alone the soul can attempt an adequate grasp ofbeings.14

In the face of the recalcitrance of this basic Pythagorean prin-ciple, Socrates turns to a myth, in which he uses theōrein for thelast time. He acknowledges the argument’s inconclusiveness andencourages Simmias and Cebes to push the dialectical inquiryfurther back, to examine more clearly the primary hypotheses inspite of their inclination to trust in them. Only if they do this suf-ficiently will they follow the logos as much as humanly possible(107b). The myth, that is to say, enters on the heels of an ac-knowledgment that the dialectic has been inadequately achievedbecause of the ultimate hypotheses from which Simmias andCebes seem unable to break free, and it seems intended to addressthis state of affairs.

In this most thoroughly corporeal of Socrates’s eschatologi-cal myths, the “higher world” is not an eidetic world or a placeof souls, but a literally higher and more perfect region of theearth, whose stones are less liable to corruption and whose peoplelive longer (by both of which Cebes has characterized soul).15

These purer and higher regions are imaginable precisely through

world of numbers and mathematical relationships from what is given in thereality of concrete appearances.” (Thus also Burkert, pp. 31 and 480.) More-over, the Pythagoreans load numbers with all sorts of noetic determi-nations, without recognizing that the noetic forms must provide theontological ground for these distinctions, such that number cannot bethe most fundamental determination of beings (unless they are seen asmore fundamental determinants of the ideas themselves, as may be thecase in the Platonic “unwritten doctrines”). Thus the Pythagoreans oc-clude the distinction between the aesthetic and the noetic. 14. If the question remains open whether the soul’s requirement of ei-detic determinations for understanding the world is to be attributed tothe soul or to the world, this is only to say that the Socratic approachkeeps the relationship of soul to world as puzzling as it ought to be aswell.15. Stones: 110e2–5. People: 111b1–3.


proportionality: as air is to water in visual clarity and purity, sothe ether in the upper regions is to air (if not more so), and thesenses and wisdom of the inhabitants exceed ours in the sameratio (111b). There the geometrically structured beauties of na-ture, the precious stones, are in plain sight, not hidden under therough ground as here (11a1–2). This higher world seems to bodyforth the main features of the Pythagorean ontological imagina-tion of reality.

In this context Socrates speaks of the hypothetical case ofsomeone from our impure part of the earth rising up to catch sightof the outer, purer surface. If his nature were up to the task ofholding himself aloft gazing (theōrousa), he would see the trueheaven and light and earth (109e5–8). Here theōrein (in a fairlytraditional sense of traveling afar to see extraordinary sights) doesexpress an image of the goal of Pythagorean inquiry, namely thevision of the purified natural and visible things. The suggestionthat one might achieve this by growing wings (109e3) remindsus of the Palinode of the Phaedrus, but thereby reinforces thecontrast that here we are speaking emphatically of an imaginedbodily journey. That the geographical context of the image sug-gests flight above the Mediterranean (especially in light of thepervasive imagery of the Theseus story in the dialogue16) alsocalls to mind Icarus, a fitting image of the calamitous misologyattendant upon the excessive hopes of Pythagorean rationalism.

The crucial detail for understanding the role of the myth inrelation to the underlying concerns of the dialogue would seemto be the remark that among those dead vouchsafed transport tothe higher regions (who seem to meet their fates in their bodilycondition), only the ones purified by philosophy go on to livewithout bodies in even higher dwelling places whose beauty it is“not easy to make manifest” (114c5). The true philosophical pu-rification, the art of dialectic conducted in light of the soul’s pur-suit of self-knowledge, is not visible or discernible throughproportion; it can only be distinctly known from the inside. Theintermediately higher world seems to translate the dangers of thePythagorean aspiration into spatial terms and to put it into per-spective in relation to the indescribable fate of the philosopher.

16. Cf. Jacob Klein, “Plato’s Phaedo,” in Lectures and Essays (Annapo-lis: St. John’s College Press, 1985), 375-393


It is not those who make their dwelling in the land of mathemat-ical purity who ascend to fundamental philosophical insight, butrather the dialectical philosopher who starts out on the roughground of our world and aims beyond the vision of a mathema-tized nature to the eidetic principles of being.

The three instances of theōrein are thus associated with threekinds of purification. The dualistic approach to philosophy seeksto purify the mind by ignoring the body, thinking it will culminatein theōrein of the true beings; but this hypothetical theōrein isconceived as belonging to a body-like soul on the analogy of bod-ily perception. The second sailing seeks to purify the logos bymeans of fidelity to the eidos in the light of the pursuit of self-knowledge; it distinguishes itself from the blindness-inducingtheōrein of natural phenomena. The monistic myth imagines apurification of the visible things themselves by placing them inhigher, purer physical conditions, and depicts theōrein of theseperfected natural beings as the inevitably frustrating, misology-inducing goal of Pythagorean thought.

This consistent emphasis on purification harks back to theuses of theōria in the initial conversation that frames the dia-logue.17 In three consecutive sentences (58b2, b5, c1), Phaedosays the following about the theōria to Delos that delaysSocrates’s execution:

1. It has been performed annually by the Athenians since theyvowed it to Apollo if he should save Theseus.

2. They must remain pure from executions while it is gone, and un-cooperative winds sometimes considerably delay its sailing.

3. It begins when the priest of Apollo lays the wreath on the prowof the ship.

Perhaps the mentions of Apollo in the first and third sentencesabout the theōria to Delos provide a key to the parallel. Apollois a god of ritual purification and of vision, which correspond re-

17. As Burkert (p.474) notes, the “significance of 3 in purification ritualwas emphasized by Aristotle” in On the Heavens 268a14.


spectively to the dualistic and monistic aspects of Pythagore-anism. Moreover, Pythagoras himself seems to have been iden-tified by his early followers with the “Hyperborean Apollo.”18

Whatever we make of these two instances, the central usehere presents a clearer parallel to the central use of theōrein: thetheōria to Delos is delayed by the sort of conditions that might(but in this case apparently do not) lead one to resort to a “secondsailing.” We learn at the beginning of the narrated conversationthat Socrates, during the period of his confinement that corre-sponds to this lag, practices his own different kind of devotionto Apollo, one that combines the soul’s self-knowledge with thepursuit of communication through eidetic precision: He is notsure he clearly understood the injunction in his dreams to makemusic, fearing that his own passion for philosophy may have ledhim to construe the class of “music” too narrowly (60e–61b).Though superficially an abandonment of philosophy, the purifi-cation he carries out through poetry reflects the purification ofthe second sailing and of Socratic self-knowledge: it too is chosenas the “safer” course (61a8, 100d8).

IV: The RepublicIn the Phaedrus, theōrein denotes, first, a steady attention to thevision of complete and eternal truth available to gods alone and,second, a non-serious delight in products of man’s art. In thePhaedo, it flirts with expressing a human vision of eternal truth,but then suggests that this excessive expectation is characteristicof a false philosophy. It becomes all the more striking, then, tofind theōria used twice in the Republic to refer explicitly to akind of intellectual vision of eternal and divine truth available tohuman beings. In Book VI, Socrates describes the philosopheras enjoying theōria “of all time and all being” (486a8).19 In theallegory of ascent from the cave to the sunlit regions, he remarksthat it should be no surprise if the philosopher, coming into thedarkness from “divine contemplations” (apo theiōn theōriōn,517d4–5), cuts a ridiculous figure when forced to deal with shad-

18. Alternatively, he was thought to be the son of Apollo (Burkert,pp.141–146, 149, 168).19. Quotations are from Allan Bloom’s translation of The Republic(New York: Basic Books, 1968), unless otherwise noted.


owy human affairs. If we look to Socrates’s relationship to his interlocutors to

explain this anomaly, we note that, of the twelve instances of the-oric language in the Republic, all but one appear in conversationwith Glaucon, even though he is Socrates’s explicit interlocutorin only a little over half the conversation.20 We note as well thatGlaucon exhibits the single use of theōrein in the whole corpusby any character other than Socrates or the Athenian Stranger(517d5).

The association of theoric language with Glaucon begins, infact, in the opening scene: he and Socrates go together to the Pi-raeus to see the festival of Bendis, and when they have attendedand watched (theōrēsantes), they start back to town (327b1). Al-though Socrates applies the participle to both himself and Glau-con, the motives he identifies are only his own: he wanted to seehow they would conduct the novel festival (327a2–3). Socrates’sjudgment, that both Athenians and Thracians conducted them-selves with equal propriety (a4–5), reveals a philosophic moti-vation of his theōrein that will be a central facet of his discussionof the best city: a desire to see how different peoples with differ-ent laws and educations conduct themselves, especially towardthe gods. The motives of Glaucon remain a question for us. Platothus invites us to pay attention to two phenomena in relation toone another: the motives of theōrein and the psychology of Glau-con.

The dramatic intervention of Glaucon also provokes the firstinstance of theōrein within the conversation. Mocking the city ofrustic simplicity Socrates has described to Adeimantus as a cityfit only for pigs, Glaucon insists that a city fit for men requiresrefinements, adornments and relishes. Socrates responds: “Nowthe true city is in my opinion the one we just described–a healthycity, as it were. But, if you want to, let’s look at [theōrēsōmen] afeverish city, too” (372e8). The feverish city becomes an object

20. The exception is in the discussion of regimes in Book Eight(556c10), where Socrates speaks of rich and poor citizens of an oli-garchy mixing together at festivals (kata theōrias) or on campaigns.This sole use of theoric language in speech addressed to Adeimantus isa strictly traditional use, which underscores the nontraditional uses inSocrates’s exchanges with Glaucon.


of attention when Glaucon’s unexamined passions introduce anew dimension of motivation into the inquiry. The question ofjustice began with Socrates’s perplexity about what exactly it is,a perplexity arising from a specific contradiction: according toCephalus’s conception of justice, certain actions appear to beboth just and not just (331c). With the intervention of Thrasy-machus, the focus shifts from the resolution of perplexity to con-troversy over the choiceworthiness of justice and of differentways of life. The theōrein of the feverish city must satisfy notonly the practical need to choose a way of life and the intellectualneed to resolve perplexity, but also the demands of certain un-questioned appetites.

The subsequent instances of theoric language fall into threetypes, corresponding to these intertwined dimensions of the mo-tivation of the inquiry. In the discussion of the auxiliaries’ earlyeducation, theōrein is used within the framework of pursuing achosen way of life. In the discussion of the philosophical natureand its education, Socrates gradually disentangles the philoso-pher’s motive to resolve perplexity from the ruler’s motive tomaintain a certain way of life for himself and his city. In the dis-cussion of imitation and dramatic poetry in Book Ten, Socratesreveals the hidden action of unacknowledged appetites in thetheōrein of the spectator of dramatic poetry. This gradual processof disentanglement reveals both the advantages and limitationsof Glaucon as an interlocutor in this inquiry.

1. Practical/Productive Theōrein. The next two instances oftheōrein occur within the discussion of whether the children ofthe city destined for the warrior class should watch the older war-riors conducting battle. Socrates, arguing that they should, speaksof an analogous need of potters’ apprenticed sons to learn the artby watching their fathers at work (467a4, c2).

This kind of theōrein has four moments: 1) the projection ofa possibility for oneself of being and doing; 2) the desire to ap-propriate a characteristic (power, skill, virtue) needed to fulfillthat possibility; 3) observation of that characteristic in action inorder to grasp its archē; 4) the emergence into view of the archē.The watching for and seeing the emergence of the archē that istheōrein proper is guided by a projection of one’s potential selftoward which one’s aspirations are directed, which is to say by


the desirability of a way of life. The paradigm to which one’s at-tention is directed is an acting human being.21

2. Theōria and Philosophical Perplexity. When the noun theōriaappears for the first time (486a8), in the context of the fitness ofthe philosopher for rule, it too, like practical/productive theōrein,results in a principle that informs action. Because of the philoso-pher’s contemplation of all time and being, he will think little ofhuman life and not fear death: he will be neither petty nor cow-ardly. Again, an activity of attention leads to the attainment of avirtue.

In the philosopher’s case, however, the principle of action isnot the thing looked for in the contemplation, but an incidentalresult of it. His theōria leads to virtue not as a result of emulatinganother philosopher, but because all his love is directed to theobjects of his attention rather than to objects that incite vice (cf.500b-c). The education of the philosopher-king requires such ab-sence of emulation, since he will only be fit to rule if he does notaspire to rule. The more detailed discussion of this education,however, brings to light a divergence between the motivationalstructure of the philosopher as king and of the philosopher asphilosopher.

The philosopher’s desire to know is initially aroused by aperplexity arising from contradictory appearances (523a–524d).He is drawn toward theōria for the sake of resolving this perplex-ity. As the allegory of the cave dramatizes, however, the prisonerreleased from the power of opinion does not know where he isgoing; only as he progresses stage by stage can he have any no-tion of the condition into which he is being drawn (515c–516b).Perplexity comes upon us, and we do not know where it will leadus, or whether its resolution will provide us with anything of in-strumental or edifying use. Perplexity of the sort that motivatedSocrates’s initial question about justice in Book One is broughtto light in Book Seven as a motivation internally distinct fromthat of practical/productive appropriation, and as distinctly philo-sophical.

The city attempts to bring it about, by means of planned per-plexity, that the philosopher approaches the “true forms” as an

21. This, incidentally, is the case for every use of theōrein by Isocrates.


appropriating artist, so as to return to the city to reproduce imagesof them. The preference for “divine theōria” over human affairs,however, initially the philosopher’s qualification for office, soonappears as a source of his awkwardness in dealing with the phan-toms of the shadowy world to which other men’s attention is con-fined (517d5). This shift of theōria from a source of harmonybetween the philosopher-king’s two roles to a source of conflictis highlighted by Glaucon’s dramatic objection to the requirementthat the philosophers, for whom “a better life is possible” (519d),leave their divine theōria and return to the cave to rule. A closerlook at his understanding of why this contemplative life is better(and his singular use of the verb theōrein) reveals his promiseand limitations as interlocutor.

3. The Ascent and Peripeteia of Glaucon. The course of the dis-cussion of poetic censorship reveals that Glaucon is much moresensitive than Adeimantus to the subtle effects on the soul of theproductions of the Muses. Adeimantus treats poetry as a sourceof overt lessons and maxims, questioning what effect the opin-ions about justice enunciated by characters or narrators will haveon the opinions of those who hear them and are persuaded of theirtruth; he is thus a fitting interlocutor while Socrates focuses onexplicit opinions communicated about gods (377e–383c). Whenthe focus shifts to effects of the less conscious process of imita-tion, Adeimantus is out of his depth (392d), and even more whenit comes to the influence of music on the soul. At this point Glau-con, who has had a musical education (398e) and shows a clearunderstanding of how different musical modes communicate dif-ferent dispositions of soul (399a–b) and can insinuate grace intoit (401b–d), takes over as interlocutor.22

Theōrein, in both its earlier practical/productive and its laterdramatic/poetic uses in the dialogue, expresses just the sort ofaesthetic internalization to which Glaucon is especially attuned.One observes attractive features of another soul or its artful prod-ucts, so as to incorporate them into one’s own soul and make itsimilarly fine. Accordingly, Glaucon understands all lovers ofspectacles—that is, all who engage in theōrein in the traditionalsense in which it is used in the opening scene of the dialogue—

22. As Socrates remarks, Glaucon remembers this discussion quite pre-cisely much later in the dialogue (522a).


to be lovers of learning (475d). If he expresses some contemptfor those who show themselves especially eager for such learn-ing, it is not because of their understanding of what learning is,but because of their lack of discrimination in the objects of theirattention and internalization. It is in response to this understand-ing of observing-as-learning that Socrates first introduces the vi-sual characterization of philosophical learning (475e), and notlong after that he begins to speak of philosophical theōria (486a).

Socrates thus begins where Glaucon begins: with a concep-tion of learning as internalization of the finest things through ob-servation, so as to produce a soul as fine as a fine statue.23 Bysupposing that the philosopher actually achieves theōria of thingsfiner than any Glaucon had imagined in his feverish city, Socratesis able to use theoric language as a stepping stone from aestheticeducation to the understanding of philosophy as knowledge ofignorance. By presenting the motivational structure of philosoph-ical theōria as different from that of the theōrein of appropriation,Socrates opens a path toward a distinctly philosophical under-standing of education as dialectical questioning, determined bythe relationship of perplexity between the philosopher and thething to be known, and modest about the possibility of attainingdefinitive knowledge. In the course of following that path, Glau-con the lover of dramatic poetry is caught in a classic plot of il-lusion of good fortune followed by reversal of fortune.

Glaucon’s recapitulation of the Divided Line at the end ofBook Six (511c–d), which Socrates pronounces “most adequate”(511d), appears to represent one of the great successes of Socraticteaching in Plato’s dialogues. Socrates has apparently succeededin communicating to a non-philosopher the structure of being andintelligibility that orients the philosophical pursuit of knowledge.Following in the footsteps of Socrates’s use of theōria to describethe philosopher’s apprehension of the objects of his attention,Glaucon sums up:

23. Glaucon imagines the fine soul on the analogy of a finely sculptedstatue (540c). When Socrates wants him to imagine the superior ex-cellence of the philosophic soul, he claims that the soul as we experi-ence it is as disfigured by foreign accretions as Glaucus–statues(611d–612a). To “see” it in its purity requires engaging in philosophyand experiencing in oneself the soul’s attempt to liken itself to theknowable (611e).


I understand . . . that you wish to distinguish that part ofwhat is and is intelligible contemplated by the knowledgeof dialectic [tēs tou dialegesthai epistēmēs . . . theōrou-menon] as being clearer than that part contemplated bywhat are called the arts. (511c)

In the educational drama, Glaucon here and in the Allegory ofthe Cave seems to have reached the high point of his fortunes. InBook Seven, however, Glaucon and the language of theōrein suf-fer a revealing fall.

After the explanation of the Cave allegory and the recogni-tion by Glaucon that the life of the liberated philosopher is a bet-ter one than the political life, the remainder of Book Seven isdevoted to the discussion between Socrates and Glaucon abouthow such philosophers “will come into being and how one willlead them up to the light” (521c). The would-be philosopher mustbe assigned studies that “summon the intellect to the activity ofinvestigation” (523b). Since, however, these philosophers arealso warriors, their studies must also be useful for the conduct ofwar (521d). The mathematical disciplines are chosen to fulfillthis double imperative of practical utility and intellectual awak-ening; but as the argument progresses, the tension within this du-ality brings to light an impediment to Glaucon’s grasp of theactivity of the philosopher.

Through the discussion of several branches of mathematics,Glaucon remains intent on detailing their practical benefits forthe warrior (526d). After Socrates several times insists on theirimportance for turning the soul toward “what is always” (526d–527b), Glaucon tries to make amends:

And on the basis of the reproach you just made mefor my vulgar praise of astronomy, Socrates, now Ishall praise it in the way that you approach it. In myopinion it’s plain to everyone that astronomy compelsthe soul to see [horān] what’s above and leads it thereaway from the things here. (528e6–529a2)

This time, Socrates responds with obvious sarcasm:In my opinion . . . it’s no ignoble [ouk agennōs] concep-tion you have for yourself of what the study of the thingsabove is. Even if a man were to learn something by tilting


his head back and looking [theōmenos] at decorations ona ceiling, you would probably believe he contemplates[theōrein] with his intellect and not his eyes. . . . I, formy part, am unable to hold that any study makes a soullook upward other than the one that concerns what is andis invisible. (529a9–b5)

The implication that Glaucon fails to distinguish properly be-tween visual and intellectual attentiveness seems odd given thatGlaucon admitted and followed the initial distinction in the di-vided line between visible and intelligible objects (507b11), andaffirmed Socrates’s inclusion of the heavens in the visible(509d5), and thus casts doubt on how well he understood whathe was saying. Socrates’s response suggests further that Glauconmistakenly thinks that his standard of praise is the same as thatof Socrates. For Socrates, the contrast between higher and loweris one between what unchangingly and invisibly is and what par-takes of change and is sensible; this corresponds to the differencebetween perfect and imperfect intelligibility. The dignity of theobject of attention (and hence the act of contemplation correspon-ding to it) depends on how intelligible it is.

For Glaucon, on the other hand, the dignity of the object ofattention seems to depend on the magnificence it imparts to thesoul. Glaucon seems to want above all to hold Socrates to hisoriginal promise that the philosophic preoccupation will producevirtues. The consideration of the stars, like Socrates’s “theōriaof all time and being,” may suggest to him a noble unconcernfor the petty cares that consume men, revealing an aristocraticdimension of Glaucon’s understanding of paideia as the culti-vation of a soul superior to vulgar and frivolous concerns. Hecan only appreciate from the outside the excellent soul of thevirtuous philosopher-king, or the superior existence of thephilosopher freed from vulgar opinion and ignorance becausehe has taken possession of the most exalted objects of sight.Thus the irony in Socrates’s rebuke is complex: when he saysGlaucon’s conception is “not ignoble” (ouk agennōs, literally“not non-wellborn” [529a9]), he is backhandedly pointing to itsaristocratic weakness. The aristocrat may have contempt for theethics of the marketplace, but he still expects a payoff from hisleisurely pursuits in some acquisition recognizable by and valu-able to others of his kind.


Glaucon accepts the justice of Socrates’s rebuke, but nowfinds himself somewhat at a loss to specify what their study aimsat; he asks vaguely how astronomy should be studied “in a waythat’s helpful for what we are talking about” (ōphelimōs pros halegomen) (529c). He has to acknowledge that he needs to be ledby Socrates to alter his understanding of education to encompasswhat Socrates means by “the invisible and intelligible” (530b).He is no longer the passionate hero fulfilling his ambition to en-compass all the best and highest things in his theōrein. Emblem-atic of this change in fortune is the immediately ensuingdiscussion of music, in which the study so dear to Glaucon,whose highest task had been engendering the graceful soul, nowserves to lead the student up to problems and inquiry into causes(531c). The pursuit of the perfectly formed soul has unobtrusivelygiven way to the cultivation of a dialectical way of being; but atthe end of the discussion of dialectic, when Socrates lays downthe need for a synoptic integration of earlier studies, to Glaucon’smind the benefit of this is still that they will stick fast as an ac-quisition, whereas Socrates is primarily concerned with revealingwho is dialectical (537c).

Having revealed the impediments in Glaucon’s soul to theachievement of this philosophical transformation, and after anextensive elucidation of the varieties of disordered souls in BooksEight and Nine, Socrates returns to the dangers of poetry in BookTen. There he brings to light certain harmful effects of poetic in-ternalization that Glaucon needs to understand if he is to attendadequately to his own soul.4. Dramatic/Poetic Theōrein. While the practical/productivetheōrein in Book Five involves a conscious self-projection, inBook Ten the theōrein that belongs to the enjoyment of poetryseems at first to be something engaged in simply for its own sake.Socrates, however, reveals that it involves an unconscious self-projection, one that may be at odds with one’s conscious choiceof proper objects of imitation and aspiration.

In this discussion, Socrates uses theōrein four times. In eachcase it refers to an attentiveness to works of art that constitutes adistraction from true knowledge. Socrates first assaults the tra-ditional aura of grandeur belonging to the poet by arguing his im-potence to lead men to truth, and then argues that the poet tendsto corrupt the soul precisely through his power to fascinate us.


The poet claims to be an interpreter of the divine, butSocrates places a middleman between the poet and the god,namely, the craftsman who makes imitations of the god-madeform, which are in turn imitated by the poet. If we look to theidea that governed the craftsman’s production, we can look in thedirection of the idea produced by the god. The poet, on the otherhand, enchants us with words. Just as absorption (theōrein) incolors and shapes leads to being easily fooled by paintings(601a1–2), so an analogous absorption (theōrein) in words andspeech leads to taking the poet’s falsehoods for truth (601a7–9).The contemplation the poet offers us is not a theophany but ascreen between us and the divine.

Next, Socrates exposes the danger of a seemingly innocentabsorption in the passions of others that poetry represents:

What is by nature best in us . . . relaxes its guard overthis mournful part because it sees [theōroun] another’ssufferings, and it isn’t shameful for it, if some otherman who claims to be good laments out of season, topraise and pity him; rather it believes that it gains thepleasure and wouldn’t permit itself to be deprived ofit by despising the whole poem. (606a7–b5)

The theōrein encouraged by the poets is not merely deceptive; itgenerates disorder in the soul, along with a deceptive self-obliv-ion on the part of the one disordered by them. Insofar as it leadsto this unrecognized dissonance, poetry is the foe of philosophy,which seeks self-knowledge and preservation of the right orderin oneself.

In the final instance of theōrein in the dialogue, Socrates in-vites Glaucon to admit that he himself is subject to the witchcraftof the poets:

“Aren’t you too, my friend, charmed by [poetry], es-pecially when you contemplate [theōrēs] it throughthe medium of Homer?”

“Very much so.”(607c8–d2)

Glaucon depends on images for understanding.24 His unnecessarydesires for fine living are responsible for introducing the poets

24. 533a; cf. 440d, 506d.


into the city in speech (372a–373c). His narrative of Gyges(359d–360d), his tragic description of the terrible fate of the justman who seems unjust (361e–362a), and his epic threat of the at-tack Socrates will be liable to for insisting on the rule of philoso-phers (473e–474a) all reveal a dramatic imagination, and suggestthat the poets have insinuated their magic into his soul—a magicthat smuggles into the soul a subconscious proto-tyrannical self-projection by reinforcing and legitimating the unlawful desiresnormally repressed in pursuit of one’s conscious self-projection.

Socrates reveals that the contest between the tyrant and thephilosopher, which Glaucon judged as an external question inBook Nine, exists within Glaucon’s own soul, and the souls ofall who enjoy poetry. He has revealed hidden motives in Glau-con’s love of poetry and spectacle, culminating a process thatbegan with the first use of theōrein in the dialogue’s openingscene, and may thereby have opened for Glaucon a much-neededpath to self-knowledge.

In the Republic, then, theōrein in its “nonphilosophical” usesrefers primarily to two ways in which we form our souls throughobservation of others and imitation of them. While we con-sciously imitate the conduct of those who exhibit characteristicswe would like to possess, we often unconsciously allow poets tolodge within our souls the desire to imitate the figures presentedto us in poetry. In both cases we internalize models of conductand understandings of what it is to be human that shape our souls.

In order to make the “examined life” available and attractiveas an alternative, Socrates has to compete with the images of manfostered by the city and the poets by presenting a fictional imageof man, the philosopher king, who fulfills the dearest ambitionsof both civic action and education in the finest things. He is, asit were, the theoric conduit that channels civic and aesthetic as-pirations into the philosophic desire to understand. But he andhis theōria are only capable of engendering the more humble ac-tivity of dialectical inquiry if they are recognized as an exagger-ated version of it.

V: Theōria, Self-knowledge, and DialecticIn each of these three dialogues, Socrates at some point uses theoriclanguage to put forward a fantasy version of the telos of philosophytailored to the shortcomings of his interlocutors with respect to theircapacity to practice philosophy as Socrates understands it. This prac-


tice involves: 1) a sense of dissatisfaction with ignorance, 2) a desireto transcend it and reach for truth, and 3) a moderation of one’s ex-pectations of success. Phaedrus, absorbed in the beauty of humanverbal artifice, requires a vision that, while promising benefits to thepractice of rhetoric, points him beyond his satisfaction with beautifulspeeches to a need for truth. Glaucon, in his quest for beauty andgrace of soul, already harbors potential seeds of dissatisfaction, butthe objects with which he seeks to furnish his soul do not lead himto adequate knowledge of his ignorance; Socrates has to offer himhigher objects for internalization and deeper self-knowledge in orderto direct his longings toward philosophy. Simmias and Cebes alreadylong for wisdom of a mathematical-naturalistic sort, but their exces-sive hopes for attaining it lead to despair and misology, and must bemoderated by the “second sailing” and the exposure of their erro-neous notion of knowledge.

Finally, though it is unclear to what extent Socrates succeedsin moving any of these characters in the direction of philosophy ashe understands it, the more important thing is that the reader see thedirection he is trying to go. When we compare the three dialogues,we see that the direction is substantially the same. Dialectical in-quiry presupposes a certain background trust in a natural eideticdistinctness of things that it can neither demonstrate nor definitivelygrasp. The ambition for such a definitive grasp in theōria is quitehuman, but its complete fulfillment is beyond human power. At thesame time, it would be rash to reject the intimation that there is somenatural eidetic structure to things which orients our efforts to un-derstand, draw proper distinctions, come to agreement, and uncoverfirst principles. Dialectic, whether understood as classing and dis-tinguishing, as examining the cogency of ideas and hypotheses, oras penetrating to more fundamental levels of hypothesis, is alwaysincomplete and on the way, but also always (and ever anew) makingheadway. The closer Socrates comes in the dialogue to forthrightlypresenting his philosophical practice in this modest way, the lessheavily he relies on the language of theōria to express the achieve-ment of philosophy.

Theōria and theōrein, then, are not technical, precise or staticterms for Plato, but words addressed to the various conditions ofspecific interlocutors. If they offer a key to his understanding of thephilosophical experience and the fruits of philosophy, it is only bymarking moments in a dialectical transcendence of false starts in thatdirection.


Two VillanellesKemmer Anderson

The Socratic Dilemma

What is the news? Has the ship come from Delos, at the arrival of which I am to die?—Socrates to Crito

The ship from Delos will always arrivewith news from the gods that juggle your fate.Who decides if you are dead or alive?

When the sailors land, how can you survivethe execution prepared on this date?Cargo ships from Delos sometimes arrive

with prophecies from Apollo to driveaway the judgment of a court’s mandatewhose law decides who is dead or alive.

From what source do politicians derivetheir hate to turn the truth that guides our state?You think the ship from Delos will arrive

on time? But let us through reason reviveyour legal case and find a delegateto sway the city to leave you alive

for now and permit our learning to thrive,though your words make some citizens irate.The ship from Delos will always arriveWith that grave choice to be dead or alive.


R. Kemmer Anderson has taught at the McCallie School in Chat-tenooga, Tennesee for over three decades.

125POEMS | ANDERSON

Palamedes’s Ghost

Then I suppose that you have only heard of the rhetoric of Nestor andOdysseus, which they composed in their leisure hours when at Troy,and never of the rhetoric of Palamedes?—Socrates to Phaedrus

I would teach Andromache how to writeHer flesh, a record of her eyes and earsTo leave behind a mirror of this sight.

The alphabet of blood seen in signs mightCut a path through the mind stained by her tearsAfter Andromache learns how to write.

The vowel screams from these war wounds would biteLike flames and burn the heart with countless biersOf piled dead through mirrors from this sight.

Consonants of bruised sounds, broken bones rightIn front of a reader’s eyes print our fearsWhen I teach Andromache how to write

Lettered memories of her city’s fright.When armies rip through lines of sons with spearsLeaving mirrors of grief strewn on site,

Words remain, picked clean from decaying lightThat casts nations into long rotting yearsOf death when women have not learned to writeA breathing mirror loomed and thread from sight.


Two PoemsElliott Zuckerman

Not Twins

We’ll never have enough rehearsal time.Someone who looks a little bit like meand I are playing twins. We’re asked to shoutsome words, one to the other, butno one will tell us which one shouts which words. No doubt the overseer, who seems distracted,is thinking of something else, perhapsanother pair of twins.

We sit at matching windows while the players, tolerably in time, proceed from doorto door. Nearby the Playhouse isalready showing posters of the play.People are lining up.The stagehands are preparing.I’m glad it isn’t to be called The Shouting Twins.

I wish they’d chosen someone elseto play my counterpart. It’s hard for him to look like me, for me to looklike him. His ears lack lobes.Nor is there kinship in our eyesor in our souls. We hardlythink alike. Perhaps we could succeedif there were more rehearsal time.

Elliott Zuckerman is tutor emeritus at St. John’s College in Annapolis.

127POEMS | ZUCKERMAN

Carrying Cordelia

I am assigned to carry in Cordelia.The old and mobled kingis weakened by the recent incidents.I have the arms and gravitas for what they call a gracious act.

Right now we’re covered in heavy sheetsof thunder, wind and rain.There’s ranting and expostulation.The lightning doesn’t seem to work, but it is silent anyway. A lactic hissnow drowns out any other sound.

Hey, ho.I still have time, but I must rushto dip my paddle in the floodand get to the king in my hurra-canoe.

The St John's Review, Volume 56.1 (Fall 2014)

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Transcript of The St John's Review, Volume 56.1 (Fall 2014)